Tradeweb inks blockchain deal with Alphaledger – Ledger Insights

Today U.S. blockchain startup Alphaledger announced it is collaborating with Tradeweb Markets, the company that operates one of the main over-the-counter markets for fixed income securities. They plan to jointly develop new products using Alphaledger’s blockchain technology. 

This marks the second blockchain initiative for Tradeweb in the span of a month – it invested in Securitize, which operates the tokenization infrastructure for BlackRock’s first digital money market fund, BUIDL.

Tradeweb currently supports around $1.5 trillion (notional value) daily trading.

Alphaledger secures Series A funding

In addition to the TradeWeb deal, Alphaledger revealed its Series A funding round led by EJF Capital with support from KDX. According to PitchBook, the figure was $9.5 million after raising a seed round of almost $6 million in 2021.

We first wrote about Alphaledger in 2022, when it used its permissioned blockchain to issue the first blockchain-based U.S. municipal bonds. The company describes itself as providing an origination and clearing platform for fixed-income securities. Additionally, it facilitates municipal bond trading between two banks on its platform. One of its subsidiaries is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and another is a transfer agent. A group of former PIMCO employees founded the company.

Blockchain helps to add transparency, traceability and to expand access. One of Alphaledger’s goals is to enable a broader geographic distribution of municipal loans for risk reduction purposes. Otherwise community bank investors are subject to hyper-local environmental risks.

The concept was validated last month when JP Morgan was involved in a municipal bond issuance using its blockchain-based Digital Debt Service for the first time. This is part of the bank’s Onyx unit, which includes JPM Coin, intraday repo and a tokenized collateral network.