Hello everyone,

Last year has seen  growth and interest in Blockchain Inspired Technologies. As the first use case of Blockchain started with a payment solution, Capital Markets have been front and center of the Blockchain journey.  The Hyperledger Capital Markets Special Interest Group is the venue at the intersection of Hyperledger projects and Capital Markets.

Last year we had some topical and bold presentations and discussions.

1. One of the first Central Bank Digital Currencies to hit production (DXCD)- The first meeting of 2021
   
2. Automation of Capital Markets - The last meeting of 2021
3. Regulated Assets on Polymesh (a public permissioned ledger)
4. Institutional use of AMM technology (from Bancor)
   
5. The creation of a Mortgage sub-group who will convene at a different time than the main CMSIG meeting. First meeting at noon EST on Jan 13th.
   
6. An Insurance subgroup was created in 2020, this sub-group has been quite silent, we will soon have a public reveal of the action there, including an ILS token.
7. We have resources in the form of our project outputs including a Capital markets taxonomy. We have contributed this to groups like IWA who are standardizing Debt Capital Markets.

As Hyperledger is a global organization and as the APAC (Asia Pacific) region is home to some of the most innovative action in the Blockchain space; there was a call to create a schedule that accommodates APAC. Accordingly, the first meeting of the new year will happen at an APAC friendly time on January 12 at 10 pm EST - 11 AM HK, 8:30 am Indian Standard Time (IST).

The first Europe/US call will be on the 26th of Jan (which coincides with Republic day in India) at the Usual Time of 10 am EST. Adjustment in the calendars will reflect this. APAC calls may move further to accommodate the far-flung regions of the timezone better. A set of collaborators in the APAC region have been identified by Julian Gordon.

Currently we will alternate calls between US/Europe and APAC on our usual bi-weekly Wednesday schedule (the timing on APAC Wednesdays will be at 10 pm EST) and US/Europe Wednesdays at 10 am EST. I have made changes to the schedule already.

The first meeting in APAC on the 12th will feature an introduction to the CMSIG, in the form of a conversation between Julian Gordon (APAC Manager Hyperledger) and Vipin Bharathan (HLCMSIG Chair) with a healthy Q&A to follow.

1. What is the Capital Market SIG?
   
2. Why should one get involved?
   
3. What are the areas of interest?
   
4. Proposed topics?
   
5. Deliverables and Roadmap? 
6. Q&A
   
7. 
   

Given below are suggested topics for 2022...Most of these deal with the changes that are afoot in the Finance world.

1. CBDCs as payment rails (for Capital Markets and otherwise)
   
2. Token Standards for Capital Market tokens....
   
3. Settlement - Liquidity considerations in an automated world.
   
4. DeFi into Financial Infrastructure
   
1. Regulation of DeFi 
2. Pricing and Risk management of DeFi

5. Custody of Digital Assets
   
6. Breaking Silos (Identity, Tokens, Payments) and capital markets
7. Interoperability (Chain and otherwise)
   
8. NFT and Capital Markets
   
1. NIFTY proposal to build opensource solution in Hyperledger labs: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CP/NIFTY
   
2. NFTs <--> FTs.
   

Obviously this list is not graven in stone. Please respond (via email, wiki page etc.)- your suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Vipin

Vipin Bharathan

Digital Transformation Consultant

Financial Services (Blockchain, ML, Design Thinking)

vip@...