Interoperability Connectors

The financial services ecosystem consists of a variety of established and competing technological standards, which challenges the possibility of “one-size-fits-all” solutions for legacy and digital assets. Data formatting and standards can vary greatly across different networks and ledgers, which makes reconciliation of complex multi-party, multi-asset transactions across systems difficult.

In response, Knox Networks designed a flexible and future-proofed system that could interoperate with versatile programmable ecosystems in the digital assets space and traditional legacy systems. Knox has developed interoperability methods for interacting with tokenization platforms, blockchains, DLTs and traditional payment rails.

Knox's interoperability has 3 different modes for interacting with different systems.

Interop Mode #1: Relay Bridges Cross-Chain

Knox supports relay bridges based on open source standards such as Hyperledger Cacti, which enables interoperability with other ledgers that support the same relay mechanism.

Interop Mode #2: Hashed Timelock Contracts

Knox supports protocols such as HTLC to bridge transactions with other ledger technologies that support HTLC, e.g., any EVM Chain, Hyperledger Fabric, Firefly, R3 Corda, DAML, as well as interaction with the ERC-20 token standard.

Both the above techniques enable coordinated asset transfers and exchanges across Knox and the other ledger.

Interop Mode #3: Interoperability with Traditional Payment Systems

Knox allows the transporting of messaging information in any standard alongside a Knox transaction. For example, ISO 20022 or SWIFT MT equivalents can be carried along with the Knox transaction.

Knox's event-driven architecture supports writing adapters that can translate back and forth from standards such as ISO 20022, SWIFT MT, and FIX and can integrate with any messaging standards. All fields from the Knox transaction are available for mapping to fields within these standards. Internally, Knox uses standards such as UETRs (UUIDV4), ISO Dates and ISO currency standards, for ease of mapping to the same fields in ISO 20022 and MT messages.

These adapters can form on-ramps/off-ramps with existing messaging interfaces products used at banks, over protocols such as MQ, file based adapters, or REST APIs.

The file-based ownership structure of the system means that FBDAs can be embedded across other payment networks (e.g., traditional bank account systems or DLT-based platforms like Ethereum), including stakeholders that are not using Knox Networks and stakeholders that are required to use various financial standards (e.g., ISO 20022, SWIFT).

FBDAs allow interoperability across virtually all major ecosystems because they just require the system to have the ability to transfer small packages of data. For example, FBDAs could be embedded within an ISO 20022 message to transfer to another party. This means the Knox Networks software platform can support multiple regulatory and currency regime requirements.