Symbiont (company)


Symbiont is a blockchain technology company based in New York City, New York. Symbiont develops the Assembly blockchain platform, as well as programmable versions of traditional financial instruments that run on Assembly as smart contracts. Assembly distributes data across a network of computers owned and controlled by different financial institutions while preserving data confidentiality, and the smart contracts written in its proprietary language, SymPL, automate business workflows. Symbiont Assembly is used by financial institutions, including Nasdaq, Citigroup and Vanguard.

History

Symbiont was founded in 2015 by Mark Smith, Adam Krellenstein, Evan Wagner and Robby Dermody. Symbiont early investors include Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and former co-head of Citadel Matt Andresen. In January 2019, Nasdaq Ventures led a US$20 million Series B round. Citigroup, Mike Novogratz’s crypto-focus merchant bank, Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. and Raptor Group Holdings also participated in the round. Symbiont has 75 employees as of June 2019.

Products and customers

Symbiont's blockchain products manage the life cycle of financial instruments such as mortgages, private equity, syndicated loans and market data by creating digital representations of them on a decentralized ledger.
In December 2017, Vanguard announced a pilot program with Symbiont to build a product for managing index data on its blockchain platform. Vanguard now uses Symbiont blockchain technology in production to manage US$1.5 trillion of index funds, for the purpose of eliminating manual reconciliation between Vanguard and the Center for Research in Security Prices, who provides Vanguard with market data. This was the first production integration of blockchain technology by a major financial institution into one of their core systems.
Vanguard also uses Symbiont technology in a venture aimed at allowing for peer-to-peer trading between asset managers in the foreign exchange market. The Assembly FICC network allows for the decentralized collateral management among asset managers trading in foreign exchange and mitigates counterparty risk.