Wall Street banks prepared to dump millions into blockchain startup

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In 2013, an enterprise blockchain company began churning over a new idea that would help financial institutions better and more confidently embrace cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. The New York- based company, Axoni, was able to attract $18 million through a Series A funding round three years later that was led by Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Andreessen Horowitz was also involved in the funding round at the time and, now, all are back at the table in Axoni’s latest Series B funding round.

Through a press release, Axoni announced that it has just completed its latest collection of funds, attracting another $32 million. In addition to those financial giants already mentioned, Citigroup also got involved again (it didn’t participate in 2016, but invested the following year), as did Franklin Templeton, Digital Currency Group, Y Combinator and, once again, Horowitz.

Axoni will use the investments to help it develop its AxCore platform, designed to be the foundation of all platforms in the $11-trillion credit derivatives market. Axoni CEO Greg Schvey said, “Our strategic partners have been critical to our success so far; we are delighted to strengthen and expand those relationships with this financing as we continue to deploy Axoni’s technology.”

To innovate AxCore, the company will be spending a great amount of resourced to develop AxLand, a scripting language for Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. The language is used to manage the formal verification process of the contracts.

According to C. Thomas Richardson, who leads the Market Structure and Electronic Trading Services division for Wells Fargo Securities, “The adoption of distributed ledger protocols in capital markets resembles the early days of adopting TCP/IP for distributed enterprise applications. We continue to be impressed with Axoni’s ability to facilitate such adoption by identifying use cases that could benefit from blockchain technology.”

Axoni already has a major deal in place with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). The DTCC manages post-trade settlement and clearing services and reportedly processes around $1.6 quadrillion in transactions each year. The company has tapped Axoni to build its distributed ledger, which will be used as the future home of DTCC’s Trade Information Warehouse.