Symbiont revolutionizes the securities industry. Smart contracts change lives

Author: Amber Dingding

Traditional securities companies are mainly specialized in securities issuance and trading services, and securities themselves are a kind of trading contract. In the securities field, there are three types of securities, namely evidence securities, voucher securities and marketable securities. In the world of the Internet, everything is programmable. When Bitcoin, launched by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, gained a certain influence, the core technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain, was also deeply excavated. Its advantages such as decentralization and information immutability, which are related to the problems that securities companies encounter in actual operations, will be effectively solved, which can greatly improve their efficiency and reduce costs. Smart contracts were born for this purpose, and some people also call them smart securities. Through blockchain technology, it can obviously ensure that securities transactions on the blockchain become more secure and transparent, and can obtain very complex properties.

When it comes to smart contracts, actual cases are needed to better demonstrate the practicality of smart contracts. As a financial technology company that focuses on establishing a symbiotic relationship between traditional financial markets and cryptographic blockchain technology, Symbiont is concerned about the development of smart contracts and how they will disrupt the existing securities system.

It is reported that the smart contract company Symbiont may attend related activities of the Shanghai Blockchain International Week in September to interact with various people in the blockchain industry.

What is the “smartness” of smart contracts?

Symbiont has the most say in the development of smart contracts. In March 2015, the founder of Bitcoin 2.0 project Contract Party and MathMoney f(x) jointly created Symbiont, which is mainly an automatically executed digital contract stored in the global shared database of the blockchain and not controlled by any single party. This solves the long-standing problems in the modern financial market and improves the transparency, liquidity and overall functionality of the entire capital market.

In fact, Symbiont's smart contract system is designed to manage those financial logics, and it works very simply and clearly. Business logic such as foreign exchange trading and the display of these financial instruments are very simple for smart contracts compared to tokens. Integrating these systems involves securities settlement, when algorithms seek the best settlement method to combine long and short positions, for example, so that hundreds of transactions can be settled at a very fast speed.

The energy contract system is part of a complete solution and can be exposed to traditional financial technology APIs, so it can be plug-and-play when replacing existing systems. While changing the architecture, there is no need to change its usage method. For example, traders still use the original method to trade these products on the screen.

According to information, Symbiont was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in New York. It has about 10 employees and focuses on developing the application of blockchain technology in the capital market. In June 2015, Symbiont received an investment of $1.25 million and issued the first smart securities using blockchain shortly thereafter. In January this year, Symbiont completed a new round of financing of $7 million. It is reported that the company's current valuation has reached $70 million.

More capital is also beginning to be injected into this segment that can change the existing financial system. This represents a great opportunity for blockchain solutions, and more attention should be paid to understanding the state of deployment, use, and actual customer innovation to assess the impact of blockchain on financial services. According to the Symbiont website, functions such as creating third-party payments and settlements, as well as automating corporate behavior are envisioned.

Joining forces with data security giant Gemalto

In January 2016, digital security giant Gemalto announced a partnership with blockchain startup Symbiont to enable financial institutions to more securely execute transactions and smart contracts on blockchain-based platforms. What is the charm of Gemalto that attracted Symbiont to cooperate with it?

According to the agreement, Symbiont will use Gemalto's SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM) to protect the security of identities and transactions on the blockchain to prevent theft, forgery of documents and other illegal activities. Using Gemalto's market-leading HSM security module to secure Symbiont's smart contract blockchain solution is also a clear step towards ensuring the security of blockchain transactions.

Gemalto’s SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM) will protect the Symbiont platform by “securely managing, processing and storing” cryptographic keys. The device also protects more than $1 trillion in financial transactions per day for some of the largest financial institutions. Integrating its hardware security module ensures “a high level of compliance and provides a high level of trust in the cryptographic identities that authorize these transactions.”

Differences between Ethereum and Symbiot

Currently, there are two smart contract systems, Ethereum and Symbiont. Generally speaking, the two systems have their own advantages. Ethereum mainly uses Solidity to write smart contracts and then runs them on the Ethereum blockchain, which is not ideal. Data operation needs to be in a more secure code base.

Because Symbiont’s top management also contributed to Counterparty, a non-profit, open-source, community-driven project software suite and protocol for the Bitcoin blockchain. In some ways, Symbiont extends Counterparty’s implicit consensus method.

In August 2015, Symbiont released its own security certification on the Bitcoin blockchain, and defined the terms, conditions and some business logic related to finance in the form of a smart contract. In addition, Symbiont has the same functions as Ethereum, it is also Turing complete and can run across account systems.