A recap of the QualitaX webinar featuring guests from Adhara include Peter Munnings, Co-Founder and COO, Marelize Kriel, Cryptographer/Blockchain Engineer, and Coenie Beyers, Blockchain Engineer and with insights on cross-chain interoperability, intraday liquidity, and the road to digital capital markets.
For decades, bank treasurers have managed their cash positions by looking backwards — consolidating end-of-day balances overnight and planning accordingly the next morning. That model is increasingly untenable in a world of instant payments, 24/7 markets, and tightening regulatory scrutiny of intraday risk. In a recent QualitaX webinar, the team at Adhara— a firm building blockchain-based solutions for banks and financial market infrastructures — laid out both the problem and a concrete technical path forward.
The Core Problem: Intraday Liquidity in a T+2 World
Consider a multinational bank headquartered in New York, with subsidiaries in London and Shanghai. Every morning, New York needs to consolidate the previous day’s balances and transactions from both locations to produce a coherent view of its cash flow position. Each subsidiary operates in a different time zone, runs different systems, generates different data formats, and faces its own FX exposure. The result is fragmentation, delay, and elevated risk — precisely at the moment when treasury needs clarity most.
Peter Munnings, a founder at Adhara, traced this challenge to a structural mismatch. Post-2008 regulation — specifically BCBS 248 from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision — formally required banks to implement tools for monitoring intraday liquidity flows. Banks responded: most now have reasonable visibility into their intraday positions. But visibility and control are different things.
The settlement infrastructure surrounding banks — central banks, CSDs, CCPs, FX netting systems like CLS — was designed for batch processing and T+2 settlement cycles, not intraday management. You can see the problem forming, but the plumbing doesn’t yet let you fix it in real time.
The opportunity that blockchain-based platforms are beginning to unlock is the ability to act on intraday positions — swapping surplus in one currency for a short position in another through mechanisms like intraday FX swaps or repos — rather than simply observing them.
A Growing Digital Capital Markets Ecosystem
Adhara’s analysis, drawing on research from several leading banks, points to an emerging digital capital markets ecosystem built around blockchain platforms that are interoperable by design. The key components are:
Digital cash instruments: wholesale CBDCs, bank deposit tokens (such as JPMorgan’s JPM Coin or Citi’s announced initiatives), and interbank settlement tokens backed by Central Bank money
Digital asset platforms: covering securities, repos, collateral, and structured products
Interoperability infrastructure: enabling these platforms to communicate and settle across one another atomically
Practical examples are already live. Adhara was involved in the first cross-chain intraday FX swap settlement, executed with Finom in October of the prior year. HQLAx — the Deutsche Börse-owned digital collateral exchange — has a live product for swapping baskets of dollar-denominated securities against sterling-denominated securities. JPMorgan and Broadridge are running production repo settlement via JPM Coin. Finality, a bank-backed consortium focused on private issuance of wholesale Central Bank cash on blockchain, announced their Series B funding days before the webinar and is expected to go live imminently.
The message from the Adhara team is clear: this is no longer a proof-of-concept conversation.
DC Commander: Adhara’s Treasury Integration Platform
To help banks navigate this expanding ecosystem without drowning in integration complexity, Adhara built DC Commander — a treasury connectivity and management layer that sits inside a bank’s own infrastructure.
The product connects a bank’s front office risk systems, payment gateways, treasury management systems, and deposit token solutions to external platforms such as Finom, HQLAx, Margin Block, and others. It surfaces a unified, real-time post-trade view across all of these digital ledger platforms, while enabling the treasury to act — executing swaps, repos, or collateral transfers — through a single interface rather than managing a proliferation of bespoke integrations.
The architecture is deliberately modular: some components are hosted inside the bank, others outside, with APIs providing the connective tissue. The goal is to give banks the benefits of the new digital platforms without the operational overhead of managing each one independently.
Harmonia Lab: Setting the Standards for Cross-Chain Interoperability
Alongside its product work, Adhara is an active contributor to Harmonia Lab, a Hyperledger Foundation initiative established by a group of banks to define the principles, requirements, and reference implementations for cross-chain interoperability in financial services.
Production-first thinking: even proof-of-concept implementations are designed with the question “how would this work in production?” from day one — covering who runs which component, how it is secured, and which APIs are exposed
Minimum viable flows: enabling banks to adopt incrementally without requiring a wholesale switch to new infrastructure
Open standards alignment: building on widely-adopted distributed ledger technology (Ethereum) and contributing to interoperability standards bodies
Native on-chain assets: treating tokenised assets as first-class citizens, not just representations of legacy instruments
Critically, the requirements codified in Harmonia came from the banks and platforms themselves — not from technologists imposing a design. This grounds the work in real commercial and legal needs, including the governance structures (rule books) that govern what participants can and cannot do, and the legal recourse available when things go wrong.
The Technical Architecture: How Cross-Chain Settlement Actually Works
The most technically detailed part of the webinar came from Marelize Kriel, Cryptographer/Blockchain Engineer responsible for the cross-chain interoperability implementation. She walked through two core settlement flows implemented in the Harmonia Lab open-source repository, both based on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) cross-chain interoperability specification.
The EEA spec is structured in three layers:
1. Application layer — business logic (the SLA, trade terms, and credit rules)
2. Cross-chain function call layer — enables generic remote smart contract calls between ledgers
3. Messaging layer — verifies the cryptographic proofs that underpin those remote calls
Payment vs Payment (PvP): Ethereum to Ethereum
The first flow covers swapping tokenised dollars on one Ethereum network for tokenised pounds on another — the atomic cross-currency settlement use case.
The approach uses a leader-follower protocol:
Both banks pre-agree on a trade ID and independently place a hold on their respective token balances, designating the shared settlement contract as the authorised executor. Bank A initiates the “lead leg” on the source ledger; the contract verifies the hold exists and emits a cryptographically provable event.
An interop service captures this event and constructs a Merkle Patricia proof — using the same data structures already native to Ethereum — and presents it to the destination ledger. The destination ledger verifies the proof, executes the corresponding hold on Bank B’s tokens, and emits its own confirmation event. That confirmation is proven back to the lead ledger, which executes the final leg.
The key design principle throughout: atomic finality. Both legs settle or neither does. There is no timeout, no probabilistic outcome, and no reliance on legal contracts to resolve a half-settled trade.
Delivery vs Payment (DvP): Corda to Ethereum
The second flow is more architecturally complex: delivering securities held on a Corda ledger against cash payment on an Ethereum ledger.
Corda’s state model differs fundamentally from Ethereum’s event log — rather than emitting events, Corda consumes existing states and produces new ones. To bridge this, Adhara built a Corda decoder service that takes a signed Corda transaction and wraps it in a Merkle proof using the same consensus participants (Bank A, Bank B, and the Corda notary) who were party to the transaction.
The securities (represented as HQLAx Digital Collateral Records — baskets of securities with earmarking functionality) are locked on the Corda side; cash holds are placed on the Ethereum side. The Corda proof is presented to the Ethereum ledger, verified, and upon successful verification the cash hold is executed and an Ethereum event is generated — which is then proven back to Corda via callback to complete the transfer of securities ownership.
The same atomic finality principle applies: either both legs settle or cancellation flows are triggered cross-chain, preventing any asymmetric outcome.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: The Next Layer
One of the most forward-looking parts of the discussion concerned the role of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology in the permissioned financial infrastructure space.
The current approach uses block-header Merkle proofs — well-understood, battle-tested, but relatively expensive in terms of gas costs, particularly for Corda proofs. ZK-EVMs (such as Polygon’s and Linea’s implementations) already provide circuits that can validate Ethereum transaction execution and produce succinct proofs at a fraction of the cost.
The potential extension to Corda — wrapping Corda transactions in ZK proofs rather than Merkle proofs — would dramatically reduce costs, though no one in the market has built a Corda ZK-JVM yet.
More broadly, the Adhara team sees ZK technology as the path to scaling cross-chain interoperability: the same mechanisms that enable Layer 2 scaling for native Ethereum assets could, in time, be applied to cross-ledger settlement between multiple enterprise networks.
The Public Chain Question
The webinar closed with a question that the financial industry has been circling for years: will traditional finance eventually settle on public, shared blockchain infrastructure — much as the internet became shared telecommunications infrastructure — rather than maintaining permissioned, consortium-owned networks?
The Adhara team’s answer was honest and nuanced:
Banks are not waiting for this answer to deploy solutions today. Their deposit token projects, intraday FX infrastructure, and collateral platforms are moving forward on permissioned networks regardless of what happens in the public chain space. Adhara’s products are designed to support either environment — the underlying Ethereum-based architecture means that a move to a public ledger, should clients ever want it, would not require rebuilding from scratch.
But the resistance to public chain infrastructure for high-value cash and settlement is structural, not merely technical. The core issue is jurisdiction. Central banks are responsible for the security and integrity of their currencies. Moving settlement onto a public network where validators may be located in any jurisdiction — and over which no single regulator has authority — is a fundamentally different governance proposition from today’s model.
The most likely path forward is a gradual one: securities before cash, small-value transactions before systemic ones, and a steady accumulation of evidence that public infrastructure can handle the volumes, resilience requirements, and regulatory scrutiny that financial market infrastructure demands. Five to ten years is a reasonable horizon for that picture to begin to clarify.
Key Takeaways
- Intraday liquidity management is the core treasury challenge: banks have monitoring tools, but the settlement infrastructure does not yet support real-time management of intraday flows
- The digital capital markets ecosystem is here: PvP FX swaps, DvP repo, and collateral exchange platforms are live or going live in the near term — this is a production conversation, not a research one
- DC Commander provides banks with a unified integration and visibility layer across these new platforms, connecting to internal treasury and risk systems through APIs
- Harmonia Lab is establishing the open standards and reference implementations for cross-chain interoperability that the industry needs to avoid fragmentation
- Atomic finality is non-negotiable: the leader-follower protocol with Merkle proof verification ensures that cross-chain settlement either completes on both sides or cancels cleanly — no partial settlement, no legal workarounds
- ZK technology offers a credible path to cheaper, more scalable cross-chain proofs — particularly for Corda integration — but regulatory understanding is still catching up
- Deposit tokens are advancing independently of CBDCs: banks are not waiting for central bank digital currencies to begin tokenising their own deposits and deploying them for settlement