Blockchain Adoption on the Agenda as Deutsche Bank Leads $31M Axoni Series B
Deutsche Bank has participated in a $31 million Series B add-on funding for blockchain startup Axoni which the bank says could have profound implications for the future of the capital market. The intersection of mainstream finance and the novel decentralized ledger technology (DLT) continues to expand with several participants creating protocols that will improve the speed, efficiency, and scalability of the global asset trading market.
Axoni Gets More Fuel for Blockchain Disruption of Global Financial Markets
According to a press release issued on Monday (Feb. 1, 2021), Axoni has closed a $31 million equity financing round led by the likes of Deutsche Bank and Intel Capital. The communique also revealed that investors from previous funding rounds like J.P. Morgan, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs also participated in the Series B add-on. With the recent $31 million, Axoni has now raised about $90 million from its investment partners.
As previously reported by BTCManager, Goldman and J.P. Morgan invested $32 million into the fear in the middle of the 2018 bear market. At the time, the move represented a further interest in the Axoni project which began after the duo abandoned its interest in the R3 blockchain consortium.
Axoni is one of the more successful enterprise blockchain projects with a special focus on adopting blockchain for automatic financial markets. Indeed, according to Forbes, this latest $31 million investment could potentially save the capital market billions of dollars.
Commenting on this potential, Henrik Johnsson told Forbes:
““Across the banks, the potential reduction in operational risk is certainly in the hundreds of millions, if not in billions.”
These cost savings could come in the form of integrating DLT into the global capital markets matrix to eliminate many of the redundancies and inefficiencies that exist within. Blockchain-based automation could help to make middlemen irrelevant in processes like corporate bond issuance.
DLT Adoption in the Capital Market
Back in 2015, BTCManager reported that blockchain adoption in the capital market was a matter of “when, and not if.” As part of its 2020 Enterprise Blockchain report, LeadBlock, a European venture capital (VC) firm revealed that the financial services industry was the most prominent use case for DLT in the region.
Already, blockchain is making a significant splash in the bond issuance arena with banks and financial institutions from around the world tapping the technology to issue bonds. Back in December 2020, UnionBank and Standard Chartered unveiled a $190 million blockchain-based bond issuance project.
