Nearly two years after its debut, Goldman Sachs ponders whether its Digital Asset Platform (DAP) should become an independent, standalone business. The platform, housed in the bank’s Digital Assets business, allows users to issue debt and cash offerings as tokenized assets and manage them throughout their lifecycle.
The bank expects to make its final decision in 12 to 18 months, reported Bloomberg.
“We view this as an important next step for our industry as we continue to build out our digital asset offerings for our clients,” said Matthew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, in a statement.
The bank has also turned to electronic secondary bond market operator Tradeweb to take advantage of the market’s expertise in fixed-income trading and liquidity.
“Our goal is to create and utilize a solution that ushers in a new wave of access, liquidity, and interoperability for the digital financial markets, introducing new capabilities to the marketplace that advance market structure and connectivity,” said Chris Bruner, chief product officer at Tradeweb, in the same statement.
The bank spent a year working with blockchain infrastructure provider Digital Asset to develop the platform using the vendor’s open-source Digital Asset Markup Language and Canton blockchain. At the end of November 2022, DAP had its inaugural transaction as part of Project Venus, a collaboration among the European Investment Bank (EIB), Goldman Sachs Bank Europe, Santander, and Société Générale to enable investors to purchase and pay for tokenized securities using typical fiat currency. The transaction consisted of the EIB issuing a €100 million two-year digital bond on DAP with Goldman Sachs, Santander, and Société Générale settled the bond’s underwriting against the EIB using euro-denominated central bank currency provided by the Banque de France and Banque centrale du Luxembourg for the project. Société Générale Securities Services acted as the on-chain custodian, while Goldman Sachs was the account keeper. The transaction also represented the first syndicated deal to settle on the same days as the transaction and the first issuance of a digital bond under Luxembourg law.
