Three technology companies are collaborating to create a bridge for banks from their legacy systems to blockchains like Ethereum. BCC Group, BCware, and Synadia say their Web3Link technology, now in beta, will help banks use smart contracts — in other words, pieces of code that automatically execute terms of a contract as conditions are met — that work in their legacy computing environments and across multiple blockchains.
Banks increasingly seek to use blockchain technology for things like payments, loan syndication and loan collateralization. One challenge: it's hard to develop portable applications that work on both legacy IT infrastructure and modern blockchains. Another is that the performance of blockchain platforms is typically slow and primitive compared to what’s typically expected in the world of finance.
The three companies say the technology they’ve developed helps banks run smart contracts that work within their existing software and connects to blockchains through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflow orchestration. They also say they are in talks with some large banks about buying the software.
The BCware team in San Francisco includes many of the original founders of Tibco Software, a middleware provider banks have used in the past to integrate new software with existing platforms. The four-year-old startup has built an abstraction layer that communicates with legacy applications and decentralized finance services. In the Web3Link collaboration, BCware will provide APIs and an event-driven orchestration engine designed for high-performance, multichain applications, the company said.
“We saw blockchain as a transformational technology and we quickly realized, given our enterprise integration DNA, that blockchain is solving a great problem that hasn't been solved before and providing features that haven't been thought of before, like sharing selective data across business boundaries and immutability,” said Tugrul Firatli, founder and CEO of BCware and a co-founder of Tibco, in an interview. “We said, well, this is great, but this has to seamlessly work with existing IT infrastructures. It is an integration challenge.”
The BCC Group in Frankfurt will provide authenticated pricing data.
“Smart contracts are an unstoppable evolutionary step,” said Bill Bierds, BCC Group president. “Web3Link seeks to ensure that financial services can confidently maintain pace with other industries and achieve full value from this exciting capability.”
Los Angeles-based Synadia will contribute low latency, secure communications to help speed up the work of smart contracts by making real-time event data flow available both on- and off-chain.
Web3Link is currently in beta and will be generally available in the third quarter.
