Institutional infrastructure
On-chain settlement and margining for interest rate derivatives.
Block Margin gives bank rate desks infrastructure to settle and margin OTC rate swaps with their corporate clients - continuously, on one shared record, with a legal wrapper their legal team can read.
Book a briefing
30-minute call with the team
Scope a pilot, see the testnet walkthrough, get the full briefing PDF under NDA.
Block Margin makes continuous margining and deterministic settlement available to any bank-corporate swap relationship, with a legal framework the bank's legal team can sign off.
Chain-agnostic protocol
Current status
Cardano
Testnet
Live on testnet. Working prototype for 3-month SOFR FRAs and vanilla interest rate swaps.
XRPL
In Development
Scope under active discussion with infrastructure partners.
The market
Modernising the interest rate swap market.
For decades, bilateral interest rate swaps between banks and corporates have relied on ageing, fragmented infrastructure. Most transactions remain uncollateralised or only periodically margined, making intraday risk management impractical and leaving material counterparty exposure embedded across the system.
Structural inefficiencies
- 01
Corporates pay inflated pricing
Bank credit risk on uncollateralised flow is embedded in the spread. The corporate is the end-payer.
- 02
Banks carry elevated capital
SA-CCR, CVA, LCR and NSFR charges sit against every unmargined trade. RWA density climbs with the book.
- 03
Regulators oversee residual exposure
Persistent uncollateralised bilateral exposure is visible in supervisory data but slow to reduce at source.
One of the largest markets in the world
$500T
Outstanding IRD notional/BIS H1 2024
$2-5T
Traded daily/global turnover
Today this flow is dominated by financial institutions. Corporate and retail hedging sit at around ~5% of volume - the growth runway the platform is built to capture.
At this scale, incremental friction compounds into billions in excess costs each year - paid in wider spreads, held as trapped capital, and carried as uncollateralised risk on the supervisory book.
The standard
A new margining standard.
Block Margin introduces a shared, deterministic on-chain margining layer for bilateral derivatives. One record, both sides, computed against the same timestamped curve and settled atomically.
What changes
Continuous
Intraday margining against a timestamped oracle curve. VM is recomputed on every publication, not end-of-day.
Efficient
Reduced counterparty risk and capital intensity. Margined bilateral flow attracts materially lower SA-CCR and CVA capital than unmargined.
Bilateral
Full preservation of the bilateral relationship - custom tenors, custom size, custom notional schedule. No CCP, no SEF, no trading venue.
Continuous margin balance across oracle publications
By removing embedded credit premiums and operational friction, Block Margin lowers hedging costs and expands access to a market that remains out of reach for many participants.
Who benefits
A shared layer lifts every participant.
The same on-chain margining layer produces a different, specific outcome for each side of the market. No trade-offs between participants - the benefits compound.
01
Corporates
Tighter pricing and more efficient hedging. The 50-100 bps of markup typically priced into uncollateralised bilateral flow collapses when margin removes the credit component.
02
Banks
Capital efficiency and return on equity. Continuous margining attracts the lower SA-CCR and CVA capital treatment applied to collateralised flow; LCR and NSFR contingent charges on the uncollateralised leg are removed.
03
Institutional investors
Simpler, more accessible entry to bilateral derivatives. Deterministic initial-margin methodology, reproducible against the published oracle snapshot - no bespoke IM negotiation per counterparty.
04
Regulators
Reduced systemic exposure and improved transparency. Every margin call, delivery, and settlement is an immutable on-chain event - directly observable, deterministically auditable.
Team
Built by people who have run rate books.
The Block Margin team combines decades of direct experience on sell-side rates desks, derivatives clearing, and on-chain infrastructure.
Dmitry Shibaev
20+ years across front-office rates trading, regulatory stress testing, and on-chain infrastructure. Senior mandates at JP Morgan, UBS, and NatWest Markets covering trading, platform development and risk management.
Tony Woodhams
20+ years across capital-markets and risk advisory practices at leading management consultancies and the Big Four. Senior mandates at Morgan Stanley, HSBC, and Credit Suisse covering trading risk, regulation, and front-office transformation.
Paulo Rosario
20+ years across data science and quant executive roles in regulated indices, asset management, and AI platforms. Senior mandates at an LSEG MTF and M&G, building derivative-index production pipelines and quant models for the investment desk.
Frequently asked
Questions a bank's legal, credit, and operations teams typically raise first.
Ready to scope a pilot?
Tell us your role and what you’d like to cover. We’ll schedule a 30-minute briefing call with the team.
Or try the testnet
Launch the app from your side of the trade.
For banks
Settle and margin with your corporate clients.
Warehouse rate risk on-chain. Post once, margin automatically, settle deterministically. Your existing corporate relationships, fewer ops.
Launch as a bankFor corporates
Hedge your floating-rate exposure with your bank.
Hedging priced closer to market, with a clean IFRS 9 audit trail. See For the corporate for the full picture.
Launch as a corporate