Introduction

Ledger Tradelink is a trading protocol that enables off-exchange trading for financial institutions, secured and powered by Ledger Enterprise software and hardware.

Tradelink enables the creation of off-exchange trading by offering a quick and easy way to set up the governance and access rights to accounts across multiple parties (multi-party governance). Multi-party governance defines the set of rules enforced on each party, allowing different entities to monitor collateral levels, create accounts, pledge and settle collateral and so on.

Trading technologies such as Trading platforms (OEMSs), Smart Order Routers (SoRs), Net Settlement/Matching engines, and alike can quickly and easily integrate with Ledger Enterprise Tradelink, allowing Tradelink clients to build a variety of new financial applications by connecting to a number of available API endpoints.

Before diving into our documentation, there are some important definitions to consider:

In Tradelink account governance, we define three roles that drive the implementation of collateral account rules:

• Asset Manager : buy-side entity trading on Exchanges by pledging assets on a Tradelink Collateral Account.
• Custodian : Custodian of the Collateral Accounts where assets will be pledged. Often referred to as collateral agent, e.g. qualified Custodian.
• Exchange : sell-side with whom the other parties have agreed to receive a trading line based on the guarantee of pledged assets on collateral accounts. Often referred to as a Liquidity Provider.

We define a “collateral account” on Tradelink (often referred to as Tradelink Account, marked with prefix “TL”, e.g. TL-XXX-XXX-XXX) as an account type which holds digital assets for the purpose of pledging, and “collateral” as an amount an Asset Manager is willing to lock (pledge) with a Custodian to have a credit line with an Exchange based on a predefined agreement among those parties.

We define “pledging” on Tradelink as the commitment of assets in a collateral account to secure a collateral position with an Exchange, which is willing to provide a trading service to a client based on that guarantee.

We define “settlement” as a transaction request raised by an Exchange when a client has completed trading on their platform and there is a resulting balance payable and/or receivable that needs to be transferred.