OTC Exchange Network (OTCXN), a blockchain-powered capital markets infrastructure company, today announced that it completed its first live test trades for the exchange of tokenised fiat currency and bitcoin.

The infrastructure provider says that it believes this to be the first time that tokenised US dollars and tokenised bitcoin have been exchanges between two separate trading accounts over an electronic trading platform with assets held in safekeeping at a neutral custodian and digitised on blockchain.

Currently, institutional traders usually conduct block trades of fiat currency and cryptocurrency over e-mail and chat, relying on the reputation and credibility of their counterparties to honor their part of the trades, often taking hours to confirm and settle. The OTCXN platform aims to remove trading counterparty and settlement risk with an atomic exchange of assets on high-performance blockchain and facilitates settlement of transactions instantly, not in hours or days.

The OTCXN network is designed so that custodians can use the provided solution to create unique, private blockchain ledgers to represent assets they safekeep on behalf of traders on the the network. Counterparties’ trades over OTCXN’s block trading platform are enforced by real-time pre-trade credit checks against provable assets on the custodian blockchain ledgers. Trading entities on the OTCXN network use the provided solution to interact directly with the custodian for issuance and redemption of their digital assets.

The test trades were conducted using two separate accounts maintained at an escrow services company by OTCXN, one account holding US dollars and the other holding Bitcoin. Volantis Escrow Platform served as the custodian.

“We are profoundly excited to participate in this, the first trade of its kind,” says Barry Thompson, managing partner of Volantis Escrow. “We believe that OTCXN’s platform will transform the marketplace, by enabling assured and transparent execution, becoming a trusted cornerstone driving the maturation of the fiat and crypto markets.”

“We believe this is a world first,” comments Rosario Ingargiola, founder and CEO of OTCXN. “We’ve received dozens of inquiries from trading firms and custodians about our launch date. I’m thrilled that our live test trades were a success and that we’ll soon bring our solution to the market. An independent custodian used OTCXN’s solution for custodians to digitise both fiat and crypto, and these assets were exchanged instantly without trading counterparty or settlement risk.“

OTCXN’s first product delivers end-to-end OTC block trading capabilities for trading fiat vs. crypto, crypto vs. crypto and fiat vs. fiat, all for delivery with instant settlement. The firm plans to launch a public beta on July 9, 2018.

OTCXN also made the news this week with its acquisition of Ogg Trading, which Profit & Loss was the first to report on.