Aptos Labs, a blockchain startup founded by former Meta Platforms Inc. employees behind the defunct Diem blockchain, today announced that it has forged partnerships with major technology and finance firms to build out Aptos Ascend, its digital asset management platform for financial institutions.

Aptos Labs is a Layer 1 blockchain, meaning that the technology is built to allow digital asset trading and transactions on a large scale. It was designed to rival blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, which is the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization. Aptos Ascend is a suite of solutions for institutional finance, including permissioned digital asset controls that will allow businesses to take advantage of tokenization and security using blockchain technology.

To build Aptos Ascend, the startup collaborated with Microsoft Corp., SK Telecom Co. Ltd. and hedge fund management firm Brevan Howard to weld together different technologies to forge its blockchain-enabled institutional service. The company said it will use Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to provide artificial intelligence capabilities, alongside Brevan Howard’s international and market-specific investment expertise.

These will be combined with SK Telecom’s regulatory-compliant blockchain wallet-as-a-service technology to allow businesses to get up and running quickly and without needing to worry about compliance concerns. These include “Know Your Customer” and anti-money-laundering measures required by local governments so that financial institutions can be certain that they stay in compliance with local regulations.

“Global institutions require superior levels of compliance, security, trust and innovation to service customers, operate across borders, and adhere to regulations at every level,” said Mo Shaikh, co-founder and chief executive of Aptos Labs. “In collaboration with SKT, Brevan Howard and Microsoft, Aptos Ascend will provide the world’s financial institutions, banks and tech-forward money markets with a performant, compliant, secure and scalable gateway to decentralized finance.”

Aptos picked Boston Consulting Group Inc. as its preferred consulting partner to work with customers to help them implement solutions that include decentralized finance, digital assets and AI. The company said it chose BCG because of its strong track record in these areas of expertise.

The startup earlier partnered with Microsoft to build AI blockchain solutions in August. This collaboration led to the beta launch of Aptos Assistant, a chatbot capable of conversationally answering questions about blockchain technology and programming. At the time, the two companies also agreed to explore further blockchain-enabled solutions including digital asset tokenization and decentralized finance.

“We see a tremendous opportunity at the intersection of AI and distributed ledger technologies,” said Adrian Crockett, general manager and head of product at Microsoft Cloud for financial services.

Financial institutions looking to work with digital asset tokens, including cryptocurrencies or tokenized securities such as stocks, will be able to use Ascend to secure their transactions by limiting them to only pre-approved entities. It also features advanced confidentiality using a cryptographic technology known as zero-knowledge proofs that maintain the privacy of account information.

Programmable smart contracts using Aptos Move allow transactions to automatically execute when predefined conditions are met. That enables reliable processing, and it also takes advantage of a fully historical, auditable trail stored on the blockchain.

“With a growing trend of tokenization in traditional finance, we expect the partnership to create a strong model for innovation in the future financial market,” said Oh Se-hyeon, vice president and head of Web3 at SKT.

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