AlphaPoint offers a custom blockchain solution for financial institutions

One of the largest bitcoin exchange liquidity and technology providers, AlphaPoint, today unveiled a new product called StreamCore; a private blockchain product that they have built from the ground up for financial institutions.

This flexible, multi-asset blockchain solution is said to “allow firms to interact with blockchain data easily and dynamically, providing the tools to rapidly develop and deploy a wide range of financial solutions,” according to the company.

“The blockchain represents a fundamental step forward in both security and efficiency. More and more banks are recognizing the promise of the technology and becoming strategic partners. StreamCore provides these firms a secure, dynamic platform to engage this technology as they incorporate it into their long-term visions.”
— – Joe Ventura, AlphaPoint Founder & CEO

Alphapoint’s core product offering is a suite of tools used by “more than 20” exchanges, on five continents. They offer “white label” exchange platforms, that can be branded as per the clients specification, and a shared order book for trade matching between customer’s exchanges.

Known as a shared pool of liquidity, this feature allows a ‘buy’ order on an exchange to be matched to a ‘sell’ order on a completely different exchange, regardless of geographic location. Liquidity, the ability to fill orders quickly, helps the market when exchanges have flash crashes, as we saw on BitFinex in August. It could be argued that the price of bitcoin today could be far lower without Alphapoints liquidity-sharing service.

However, today’s announcement gives Alphapoint a much larger client base; legacy banking and financial institutions can now be added. Multinational bank investments in the bitcoin ecosystem are increasing, over 20 big banks have made investments or formed partnerships with bitcoin startups, and many more have formed research groups, like Barclay’s and those involved with R3 CEV.

StreamCore was created to leverage the benefits of the blockchain, including immutability, strong cryptography, and instantaneous clearing, while making some significant improvements upon existing solutions, like flexible permissioning, blockchain messaging, real-time searching, and architecture security enhancements.

Alphapoint claims that this custom blockchain will provide breakthroughs in data integrity, performance, and efficiency, all while allowing firms complete control over their data.

While the claim of improved data integrity may be true when compared to other private blockchains, it has yet to be demonstrated in comparison to the Bitcoin blockchain. When Brave New Coin approached AlphaPoint on this distinction, we were assured that StreamCore would be able to use the bitcoin blockchain as a source of data integrity through some sort of linkage.

“Operators using StreamCore to build and deploy applications can absolutely link it to other blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin) to enhance persistence and auditability. It can also function as a private and permissioned ledger.”
— -Michel Haley,  Alphapoint Operations Manager

This functionality may place StreamCore on the same standing as competitor Chain Inc., who designed their private blockchain to always work with the bitcoin blockchain. They recently received over US$43m in VC funding from several giants in the financial sector, including Visa, Nasdaq, Citi Ventures, and CapitalOne.

One advantage that AlphaPoint has over the competition is that Chain is still being developed, while StreamCore is officially open for sales today.

Whether or not being first to market will prove to be a sales advantage for them, Alphapoint appears to be in a great position to contribute to the global experiment of private blockchains.

“Blockchain-enabled systems are the future of financial services. They promise to dramatically improve market structure, and we feel privileged to help institutions embrace this transformational technology,” states Ventura.