SETL, a London-based blockchain company, is open sourcing its core framework, PORTL, in an effort to speed up adoption of blockchain and DLT solutions.
PORTL provides a robust and permissioned toolset for financial institutions to build applications that interoperate between existing infrastructures and a range of enterprise ledger technologies including Corda, Besu, Fabric, DAML and SETL’s own high-performance ledger.
The adoption of DLT in financial services has been slow in spite of the tremendous potential the technology has to offer. Many of the reasons lead back to a lack of understanding of secure deployment procedures for banks, where the high levels of IT security that banks expect stands in contrast to the innovation-first approach taken by some blockchain frameworks. In addition, low speed, limited scalability and a lack of a strategy for Integration with existing systems has led to unsuccessful proof-of-concepts (POCs). What’s more, to go from POC to a live system, banks need to plan for high volume and massive scale. Any blockchain needs to work within the array of systems that banks currently deploy, including links to SWIFT, hardware security modules and enterprise identity systems, to name but a few.
Philippe Morel, SETL CEO, says: “The potential of DLT solutions is still significantly underexploited. With our open-source and fully interoperable PORTL framework, we hope to contribute to a wider adoption of DLT-based solutions.”
Anthony Culligan, Chief Engineer, adds: “We are proud to make PORTL widely available to the tech community. It covers critical components for wide adoption of DLT standards, such as a tokenisation engine, smart contract, workflow and settlement engines, running on our DLT which is one of the fastest and most scalable in the world.”
In announcing PORTL, SETL is seeking to give institutions the tools they need to take DLT and blockchain into production. The PORTL framework includes a normalising layer for a range of enterprise ledgers, a BPMN2 workflow environment based on the opensource Camunda engine and ISO15022/ISO20022 integration with SWIFT. All of the components are deployable into a secure bank environment. To ease integration with existing systems, SETL has adopted KAFKA, the open source, high volume event engine as its main backbone for inter-process communication.
Culligan adds: “Our use of high capacity and battle-hardened components such as Kafka and Camunda is in line with the technology journey financial institutions are taking. PORTL bridges the gap between ledger innovation and business integration allowing the true benefits of DLT to make the jump from POC to live operation.”
A finalist of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) CBDC challenge, SETL was also recently selected as one of Marketnode’s key technology partners. Marketnode is an SGX and Temasek digital asset venture specialising in developing DLT-based solutions for the financial industry. Its solutions are used in large-scale environments such as Citi.
Rehan Ahmed, Chief Product Officer at Marketnode, says: “We are proud to partner with SETL and share the same vision of a DLT enabled financial ecosystem alongside the paradigm shifts these innovations can enable. Marketnode is looking forward to leveraging SETL’s open-source technology to build out our next-generation end-to-end financial market infrastructure”.
Joerg Guenther, Global Head of Technology for Citi Securities Services, says: “We have been working with SETL for several years and are in the process of deploying their solutions within our Securities Services business. We believe that DLT could be transformational for our industry and SETL’s strategy to open source its technology and ensure interoperability is a positive step to enabling scalability of DLT use cases”.
