R3 Acquires Stablecoin Issuance Company Ivno Software

The technology and team of London-based financial asset tokenisation specialist Ivno has been snapped up for an undisclosed sum.

R3 is up for regulatory-friendly stablecoin issuance capabilities as it has acquired the technology and team of London-based financial asset tokenisation specialist Ivno.

Financial details were not disclosed but R3, a New York-based provider of enterprise technology and services, says the deal enables the use of Ivno-developed capabilities across its Corda platform. The latter is an open source and enterprise platform that powers blockchain applications. Corda is used by various famous names like IBM, ING, Deutsche Börse and BNY Mellon.

Aaron Grantham, CEO of Ivno, says: “Customers will be able to take advantage of Ivno’s innovative tokenisation software capabilities with the benefits offered by a true enterprise framework provided by R3.”

Todd McDonald, Chief Product Officer of R3, explains: “Digital cash and tokenised liquid assets represent one of the biggest innovations in financial markets. The underlying technology provides an opportunity to significantly optimise the cost and speed of financial transactions. The acquisition of Ivno’s high-quality software built on Corda significantly accelerates R3’s ability to offer enterprise-grade and regulatory-friendly stablecoin issuance capabilities to our customers. As the first step, Ivno’s capabilities will be integrated with R3’s Digital Currency Sandbox.”

According to McKinsey, stablecoins are typically collateralised by professionally audited reserves of fiat currency or short-term securities. They play a role today not just as ‘crypto reserves’ but also as a source of liquidity across decentralised finance (DeFi) exchanges.

Ivno was set up in 2018 and has nine employees listed on LinkedIn. Its smart contract and platform is designed for regulated financial services firms. It enables users to tokenise assets such as gold, cash, collateral and artwork.

As McDonald mentioned above, the deal with Ivno brings some more bite to the R3 Sandbox for Digital Currencies. R3 says it will allow customers to experiment with tokenisation of digital assets and explore various emerging stablecoin models before moving to the production-ready solution.

Ivno, co-founded by Chris Rayner-Cook and Dan Halstead, comprises senior financial services professionals and technology experts. Their experience encompasses fund management, operations, risk management and technology, including DLT change programmes. The development team brings over 40 years of enterprise software development and implementation project experience.

Ivno’s software is the Tokenisation engine for deployment in the Corda environment, with interoperability with other blockchain architectures such as Ethereum.

R3 has been around since 2015 and is usually busy with various deals across the globe

In terms of one relevant to the UK market, in June R3 launched Conclave, a confidential computing platform that secures sensitive business data while it’s being used. Conclave allows firms to aggregate their datasets to solve shared business problems for their customers and across markets, without revealing the actual data to anyone.

The Conclave platform uses a mix of confidential computing with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). It has an API allowing users to write applications on any operating system, as well as code in their language of choice. Conclave is currently available as a stand-alone platform and is compatible with Corda Enterprise.

In other news, last week Eddie Robb, commercial director at Zumo, discussed crypto as one of the main themes at the recent Money 20/20 conference in Amsterdam.

He noted that it is not just crypto-native protocols that are thriving; payment giants from tradfi, not least Visa and Mastercard, have rolled out or announced plans to support digital currencies. Indeed, Visa is currently looking at creating a universal payment channel to support stablecoin and CBDC transfers.

Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton is the Editor of eWeek UK. He has 18 years' journalism and writing experience. His career has taken him to China, Japan and the UK - covering tech, fintech and business. Follow on Twitter @TonyFintech.
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