Financial services heavyweight David Rutter, founder of enterprise blockchain firm R3 and U.S. treasuries trading marketplace LiquidityEdge, has assembled a team to build a new trading platform called LedgerEdge, sources confirmed this week. LedgerEdge will tackle critical challenges in the corporate bond market.

Why should we care?

A key pain point that LedgerEdge will address is data leakage, which corporate bond market participants face in discovering liquidity and executing trades. “Data is monetized by platforms and it is leaked across fragmented, opaque markets, decreasing execution quality,” Rutter said. LedgerEdge will combine blockchain tech, AI, and secure enclave computing to improve liquidity. The corporate bond market lags behind other asset classes in digital adoption, with 30% of trades carried out electronically. Building on his experience at R3, Rutter will follow a collaborative consortium approach, working with an ecosystem of market participants.