The Algorand Foundation today welcomes Exberry to the Algorand Ecosystem as our latest grant recipient. Exberry has been awarded a grant to build a primary issuance and secondary trading platform on top of Algorand, with a tight integration to the Exberry matching engine.

The interest in non-fungible tokens, otherwise known as NFTs, shows no sign of slowing down. Labelled by Christie’s auction house as “a unique work in the history of digital art”, an NFT of Beeple’s monumental digital collage ‘EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS’ sold for a record $69 million in October 2020. Six months later, an NBA Top Shot NFT featuring a LeBron James dunk sold for nearly $400,000 at auction. The month following, one of the earliest viral videos of the internet, ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’, sold as an NFT for $760,999.

As investors’ appetite for digital assets grow, regulators around the world are simultaneously increasing their focus on investor protection. This article by Magnus Almqvist, Head of Exchange Development at Exberry, highlights a number of issues that that are on regulators’ radar. Mr. Almqvist also offers a brief checklist of what digital asset marketplaces need to consider in terms of regulatory compliance.

In April 2021, Credit Suisse made some US equities trades with the Nomura-owned broker Instinet, using blockchain. While this technology has been used before to verify other kinds of transactions, these trades were considered a “first” because settlement occurred within hours, rather than the two days typically needed with America’s Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (the industry-owned utility that normally settles stock trades). This particular instance was conducted as a peer-to-peer record of trade or transaction, yet the potential of a digital network for post-trade processing is clear.