ASX takes its investment in Digital Asset to $30.9m

ASX has taken part in the latest fundraising round of its technology partner Digital Asset (DA). The Exchange has confirmed that it invested US$10 million in the round, bringing its total equity investment in DA to US$30.9 million.

DA announced earlier this week that it raised more than US$35 million in Series C funding from new and existing investors. Digital Asset, the creator of the open source DAML smart contract language, said the latest financing round brings the total amount raised by Digital Asset since its establishment in 2014 to $150 million.

The funds will be used to accelerate the adoption of DAML across multiple industries, expand the number and variety of DAML-enabled partner products and fund new products designed to enhance the DAML developer experience, specifically project DABL, a cloud-based prototyping and production environment for DAML applications.

Let’s recall that ASX is replacing its Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) with a new system based on Digital Asset’s distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Peter Hiom, ASX’s Deputy CEO, said: “ASX is a strong believer in Digital Asset and its strategy of developing the open source DAML smart contract language, and enabling applications written in it to operate across many different types of distributed ledgers. We are encouraged by the support of existing and new investors in this fundraising. This confirms our own faith in the company and its future, and that’s why we have increased our stake.”

ASX has reiterated that its CHESS replacement-DLT project remains on-track for go-live in April 2021. A customer development environment is currently open and industry-wide testing is set to commence in mid-2020.