A million-plus collateral positions repriced every 500 milliseconds across four chains, on a live network.
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Five independent chains, each with purpose-built execution environments and compliance logic, all deployed on the Espresso Network, a base layer providing ~3 second transaction finality.
One chain acts as a collateral engine, continuously reading the Espresso-finalized state of the four other chains, which hold a mix of tokenized equities, treasuries, and digital assets.
When the demo simulates a market crash, the engine responds in real time: repricing over a million positions in less than a second. When thresholds are breached, the engine triggers crosschain transactions to pledge additional collateral when available and freezing exposure when not.
The full cycle completes in under 10 seconds.
"Collateral mobility is the 'killer app' for institutional use of blockchain."
We built this demo not only to show that crosschain collateral management is possible, but to prove it works at the scale real institutional markets demand.
"Network fragmentation has emerged as one of the most pressing hurdles to adoption and the building of scale. Without interoperability, assets remain trapped in isolated pools…"
We built this demo with our partners at AWS. It uses parallelized collateral calculations on AWS’s C-family EC2 instances to handle workloads infeasible on Ethereum or traditional blockchain architectures.
The roadmap ahead includes private collateral calculation using AWS Nitro Enclaves, hardware-accelerated cryptographic operations via AWS Graviton, and geo-decentralized latency benchmarks to further reduce finality times toward subsecond.
Espresso Systems builds infrastructure that allows institutions to deploy and manage financial systems onchain without sacrificing control, performance, or interoperability. It does so with a suite of state-of-the-art technology.
The Espresso Network - a decentralized base layer purpose-built for chains and applications that demand speed, security, and customizability. The network has been live on mainnet since November 2024, has finalized more than 20 million transactions, and recently upgraded to permissionless proof-of-stake.
The Espresso Stack - a lean, highly customizable framework for building custom chains. Existing frameworks force every chain into the same general-purpose architecture: a single VM, permissionless smart contract deployment, gas tokens. Institutions building specialized applications end up paying, in cost and complexity, for infrastructure they don't need, while still being constrained from building what they actually want. The Espresso Stack inverts that tradeoff. Each chain is built only for its specific function, with no unnecessary overhead and no inherited constraints. The stack also includes the crosschain tooling to make finalized state immediately readable by any external party, meaning real-time crosschain communication is built in from the start, not bolted on afterward.
Espresso Systems was founded in 2020 by a group out of Stanford's cryptography and computer science PhD programs.
CEO Ben Fisch and Chief Scientist Benedikt Bünz are CS professors at Yale and NYU, respectively, and co-inventors of cryptographic primitives used in Ethereum, Solana, Filecoin, and Monero. COO Charles Lu rounds out the Stanford contingent, having previously worked at Binance Labs and Meta.
Chief Strategy Officer Jill Gunter is a veteran of Goldman Sachs and Slow Ventures, and served as an advisor to several blockchain projects, including dYdX, Zcash Company, Tezos, Chain, as well as to the IMF and Bank of England.
Whether you're exploring institutional blockchain infrastructure or want to go deeper on the demo, we'd like to hear from you.
Lehman Brothers collapsed on a weekend, when collateral positions sat unmonitored, thresholds went unenforced, and counterparty exposure compounded with no mechanism to respond. By the time markets opened on Monday, the damage was irreversible. The problem wasn't leverage. It was latency.
Collateral is still typically priced once per day, leaving institutions to absorb exposure that real-time infrastructure would have caught and contained.
This demo, built on the Espresso Network, is the first proof, at institutional scale, of what's possible when the infrastructure catches up to the risk.
Four chains hold tokenized equities, treasuries, and digital assets, all finalizing on Espresso in ~3 seconds.
A custom chain continuously reads finalized state from Espresso for all asset chains, reconciling positions and revaluing portfolios in real time as prices move.
When the demo simulates a market crash, the engine responds in real time: repricing over a million positions, triggering crosschain transactions, pledging additional collateral where available, and freezing exposure where thresholds are breached.
The demo below tackles crosschain collateral management head-on, showcasing a custom appchain (collateral engine) deployed on the Espresso Network capable of recalculating millions of conditions, reconciling positions, repricing exposure, and enforcing thresholds across multiple asset chains every 500 milliseconds.
When the demo begins, markets are calm. The collateral engine is constantly evaluating all collateral agreements, but price fluctuations are small and agreements are healthy. Then we simulate a market crash: equities drop 20%, crypto assets drop 10%, while fixed income assets remain stable. The collateral engine kicks into high gear, revaluing and repricing over a million collateral positions in real time, triggering crosschain transactions when thresholds are breached, either pledging additional collateral when available or freezing assets when not.
The demo shows how counterparty risk can be revealed and managed within seconds across many chains, saving money, reducing risks formerly accepted as inherent to the system, and promoting healthier markets in the process.