London, UK —
Earlier this month, Consensys unveiled Consensys Codefi, an “operating system” comprised of tools and services to help anyone— from financial institutions and large enterprises, to entrepreneurs, developers, and decentralized networks— benefit from the digital transformation of the infrastructure, manufacturing, and distribution value chains in commerce and finance. Built on Ethereum, Codefi provides the ability to digitize business processes, payments, and assets such as equities, loans, and real estate.
Consensys Codefi is a multifaceted solution with the potential to unlock value across a wide range of industries, enabling clients to:
Incorporate blockchain-native authenticity, scarcity, and programmability into workflows and assets, enabling governance, compliance, and system incentives through secure APIs and scalable, customizable software
Activate digital financial instruments to create and grow markets with potential for greater liquidity, reduced costs of capital, access to a broader investor and capital base, and improved incentive alignment between stakeholders
Leverage the pioneering innovation of the Ethereum ecosystem to create compliant, production-ready blockchain solutions for use-cases across commercial and financial sectors
As one of the earliest companies to architect production-ready blockchain solutions, Consensys has tokenized billions of dollars in digital assets, including a wide range of consumer products, currencies, real estate, and financial instruments, and has created software and infrastructure that has enabled tens of billions of dollars in blockchain-based transactions. Consensys has worked with governments, major enterprises, startups, and developers to digitize business processes and stores of value, thereby codifying their real-world attributes and enabling fractional ownership, expanded product lines, and new incentive models in business networks.
To reflect the complexity and global scale of the business, Codefi will be jointly led by London-based Lex Sokolin and New York-based Pat Berarducci as Global Fintech Co-Heads.
“By leveraging Ethereum technology to digitize business processes and assets, Consensys has, repeatedly delivered real-life solutions that are so much better— more compliant, reliable, and cost-effective— that it is clear this is the future of commerce and finance,” says Patrick Berarducci, Consensys’ Global Fintech Co-Head. “But to do it correctly, and future proof it, you really need to optimize everything from business processes to compliance, infrastructure and protocol layers. That's really hard, and that's why we're rolling out Codefi. To make it easier for everyone, and to ultimately accelerate the future of decentralized commerce and finance.”
Lex Sokolin added, “Over the last decade, innovations in Fintech and the digital transformation of the financial industry has led to broader access to financial products. This is an empowering trend— more people and organizations can pay, save, borrow, and invest in an affordable way. With the global adoption of Ethereum as the programmable blockchain of choice, we see a massive opportunity to help clients benefit from next-generation financial infrastructure, using Codefi to lower the cost of manufacturing financial products and deploying them at scale.”
Codefi has been in development in stealth since early 2019 and is comprised of a number of new and existing teams building Fintech solutions under a unified Finance and Commerce business vertical with Consensys.
Codefi will include the following modules:
Consensys Codefi
The blockchain operating system for commerce and finance, built to optimize business processes and digitize assets and financial instruments
Codefi Assets
A platform to create, issue, and manage the lifecycle of digital assets, associated markets, and digital financial instruments on public or permissioned blockchain networks
Codefi Payments
A platform to send, receive, and manage cryptocurrency payments and revenue within a single dashboard
Codefi Networks
A suite of tools empowering anyone to utilize tokens and participate in decentralized networks
Codefi Data
A data, analytics, and risk management engine for digital assets, public blockchain tokens, and their growing networks
Leveraging the scale and reach of Consensys, Codefi can work with different organizational profiles — from large institutions and regulatory bodies, to digital security issuers and independent investment managers, to entrepreneurs building protocols for decentralized finance. As the only blockchain provider to reach across both public networks and private permissioned blockchains, Codefi announced today three projects demonstrating the breadth of its platform: (1) a land title tokenization pilot initiative with the UK Her Majesty’s Land Registry, (2) a real estate securities tokenization deployment for Mata Capital, and (3) the launch of an open decentralized lending risk assessment methodology, called the DeFi Score.
1. Exploring Real Estate Asset Tokenization with HMLR’s Digital Street Initiative
Consensys collaborated with HM Land Registry (HMLR) to develop a proof of concept “Title Token.” This work has helped to inform HMLR's Digital Street Project and its recent phase of research looking at tokenization. Consensys is a member of the open Digital Street community, which is exploring how emerging technologies can bring improvements and innovation to the land registration process and wider industry.
Consensys collaborated with HM Land Registry to showcase how property and investment ownership can be tracked and exchanged more seamlessly via tokenization. Teams from the two organizations collaborated to build the Title Token proof of concept, with Consensys providing technical advice on tokenization concepts.
“The Consensys Digital Assets software lowers barriers to issuing, owning, and trading digital assets like real estate for people and organizations. Ethereum-based security tokens dramatically reduce transaction and operational costs in commerce and finance, and transparently automate the settlement process through smart contracts. Compliant tokens are encoded according to the regulatory requirements of their jurisdiction. Our experience with land title tokenization projects in Dubai, Singapore, and India, along with the issuance of real estate tokens in the US, highlight the expertise of our team and the maturity of product platforms built on emerging open finance protocols,” said, Lex Sokolin, Global Fintech Co-Head at Consensys.
2. Mata Capital, in partnership with Consensys and Screeb, deploys a blockchain platform for the real estate fund industry
Mata Capital, an independent player in the management of real estate investment funds with around 600 million euros of assets under management, partnered in July 2019 with Consensys and Screeb to optimize the issuance and management of the processing of securities registers for its real estate investment products. The launch of this new platform was carried out in partnership with Consensys Codefi, a leader in the development of blockchain software products, and
Screeb Notaires, a notary office in France that supports innovative projects in the real estate sector.
"Tokenization will allow us to provide better liquidity to our investors, especially in the secondary market," says Baptiste Saint-Martin, product development manager at Mata Capital. “Innovation is at the heart of Mata Capital's strategy, as illustrated by the recent implementation of an operational platform to secure all of our subscribers' information," adds Souleymane-Jean Galadima, director of the innovation pole and digital business at Mata Capital.
This new blockchain platform will be used for a real estate project, structured in a club deal, located in the 15th arrondissement of Paris for an investment volume of 26 million euros. "This will be the largest tokenized operation in Europe," says Baptiste Saint-Martin. In the future, its purpose will be to handle all the eligible operations of Mata Capital, which also intends to offer this white label solution to professional partners in the financial and / or real estate sectors. To carry out this project, Mata Capital relied on the expertise of Consensys and its turnkey products for the tokenization of white label financial assets. Consensys' products enable organizations to easily connect their businesses to distributed networks, deploy and manage new blockchain networks, read and write transactions, or create and manage digital assets.
3. Launching DeFi Score
Consensys Codefi is launching
DeFi Score, an initiative to establish a single metric to evaluate code and financial risk in DeFi lending. DeFi Score is an open-source, community-driven methodology to help users evaluate complex trust and risk characteristics by using a multi-factor model that analyzes smart contracts, collateral, and liquidity risks.
Consensys Codefi is introducing DeFi Score as an open-sourced methodology on
GitHub with a sample implementation to follow, and encouraging Ethereum developer communities to expand, test and use the methodology as DeFi matures. DeFi Score was developed to promote responsible lending and increase understanding around technical and financial risks that accompany smart contract lending platforms. Fore more information, check out our Medium post.
About Consensys:
Consensys is a blockchain company dedicated to transforming the world’s digital architecture toward a more open, inclusive, and secure internet of value, commonly called Web3. With a more trustworthy internet architecture, Consensys is helping enterprises and governments unlock new business models and value, gain efficiencies through a shared IT infrastructure, and utilize modern cryptographic methods to safeguard private user data. Through our unique global business comprised of a venture fund and startup incubator, Enterprise Ethereum consulting arm, and an educational Academy, Consensys is building for the decentralized future.
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