Frictionless Markets - Newsletter -January 2024
Whilst most were tucking into their turkey or posting highlight reels of 2023 on LinkedIn, the Frictionless Markets team attacked 2024 like a tiger with three incredible innovations, Institutional Deposit Tokens, FX Swaps, and ERC20 Swaps, all on Avalanche.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s just happened and what’s in the pipeline for Feb, March, and beyond.
🚀 Launch of Institutional Deposit Tokens
The pre-Christmas present panic certainly didn’t affect the Frictionless team, as our big Christmas surprise was the launch of 8 institutional deposit tokens, covering eight of the top currencies.
Institutional Deposit Tokens enable Investors to invest in tokenized funds instantly, securely and risk-free at low cost in multiple currencies.
Checkout the announcement (including the block explorer proofs) 👇
The tokens are documented on the Frictionless Markets developer portal 👇
https://docs.frictionless.markets/developer/smart-contracts/deployments/institutional-deposit-tokens
🌐 FX Swaps in 8 global currencies on Avalanche
On December 27th in partnership with Alpha FX, the Frictionless team launched and executed its first-ever tokenized FX Swap enabling the payment and settlement of investments in eight global currencies, offering investors worldwide the ability to access premier tokenized funds in their preferred currency. The FX Swap contracts in the Frictionless protocol provide an instant/atomic swap of a currency pair at a quoted spot or forward rate.
Checkout the announcement (including the block explorer proofs) 👇
FXSwap contracts are live on Avalanche at
https://snowtrace.io/address/0xA6dE189d26428A285c0d56dfCaFF8E11F664B9fC
⚡Frictionless enables payment and settlement in USDC
On Frictionless team has launched ERC20 Swap contracts enabling the payment and settlement of investments in USDC, offering investors worldwide the chance to access premier tokenized funds natively in USDC. ERC20 Swaps enable Managers to risk-off any investment or settlement in USDC on the Avalanche C-Chain whilst ensuring tokenized funds can reach the broadest possible base of Investors.
Checkout the announcement (including the block explorer proofs) 👇
🏆 TADS Awards 2023 — The Tokenized Fund Award
January is a gloomy old month in Luxembourg, but it kicked off with a warm and pleasant surprise from the TADS Awards 2023.
Frictionless Markets: We are delighted to inform you that Frictionless Markets has won the Tokenized Fund Award, under the “BEST OF CLASS TADS” Award Category of the 2023 TADS Awards. Congratulations on this great achievement among many strong contestants!
⚖️ Publication of Frictionless Markets Securities PPM, FINAL TERMS and Management Regulations
Our hard-working legal and regulatory team led by Brendan Flanagan published our Management Regulations, PPM and Final Terms for all our Institutional Deposit Tokens, along with our ICMA-approved final terms for fund tokenization. These important legal and regulatory steps are the final step in the preparation for tokenizing funds.
Put the kettle on ☕ before reading this stuff 👉 https://docs.frictionless.markets/legal
🇩🇪 Q1 Sales Camp — Berlin
The Institutional sales team led by Kaz Yasuda, met for four days in a 🥶 chilly Berlin. The team have a strong pipeline of GPs and Funds to tokenize in Q1 and soon will begin actively opening up distribution opportunities to wealth managers, placement agents, broker-dealers and investment managers.
🗓️ Contact Kaz Yasuda to book an appointment to begin your tokenization and distribution journey
💡 What’s Next?
- Security Trustee — Frictionless Markets in is discussion with an EU-based trustee to provide additional layers of protection for Investors when using Frictionless Institutional Deposit Tokens. This step will ensure a regulated counterparty will provide secured status to tokenized Financial Instruments issued by Frictionless Markets.
- LuxCMA — The LuxCMA (Luxembourg Capital Markets Association) will feature Frictionless Markets in Q1 on its site and via its feeds. The feature piece will showcase both the legal and technological innovation of the Frictionless offering along with the major advantages and benefits of securitization in Luxembourg.
- Launch of Frictionless Open API — The Frictionless OpenAPI will be launched imminently, the Frictionless Open API enables API access to Subscriptions, Capital Calls, Cash Distributions, FX OrderBook, USDC Swaps, Investor Reporting and lots more. The Frictionless Open API is delivered on Google Confidential Kubernetes Clusters to ISO-27001 standard and enables GPs, Managers and any counterparty to interact with the Frictionless fund network.
- Fund Self-Service Interface — The refreshed design of our Fund Self-Service Interface is complete and we have begun showcasing it to GPs and Fund Managers, the Fund Self-Service Interface, enables any GP or Manager to launch a tokenized fund in minutes. It’s a game-changer!
- Roadmap 2024 — The business and technology roadmap will be published and it includes some juicy capabilities for GPs and Managers to open access to their funds to a massive cohort of Investors on a global basis.
- The fsConsortium — FIRSTavenue and Frictionless Markets have kicked off the fsConsortium, the consortium is open to all private market advisors, funds, GPs, LPs, institutional investors, and service providers. The fsConsortium is a consortium of major private market players who are actually undertaking fund tokenization as opposed to talking about it. 👀 There are some big institutional names here.
