Block Time Financial is a complete middle and back-office blockchain infrastructure software company. We provide the ability to issue Stellar assets, make payments, trading, swapping, and more, all done with regulatory audit and compliance issues in mind. We track all the 5 "Ws" for blockchain operations, Who, What, Where, When, and Why, so that there is a clear and immutable record of business functions.

We specialize in the Stellar blockchain and take full advantage of many of the features, including claimable balances, mass payments, authorizations, path payments, and specialty entity identity tokens such as KYC, AML, ACRED, QUAL, and more.

We are fully involved in implementing Soroban into our platform so that our users have a complete environment for building, installing, and utilizing Soroban Smart Contracts. We have a contract management system module that keeps track of all versions of Smart Contracts, both installed by our platform and contracts that have been deployed on the network. We're planning on a fee usage module that helps predict fees and charges for smart contract usage. We also have incorporated the smart contract issuers and their roles into our UserProfile.

Our current project, the Smart Option Contract, is a prototype for a bilateral trade submission with collateral. The prototype is currently limited to a "European equity put option." With the additional grant money, we hope to expand this to option spreads and explore the use of adjusting collateral by use of other projects in the ecosphere. We have engaged multiple option traders for input and hope to demonstrate the end product to multiple exchanges with our existing contact network.

All these things will be necessary for a business to be able to build, deploy and use smart contracts in a regulatory and compliant manner. Case in point, Franklin Templeton, one of the world's largest investment managers, built software in-house to issue a regulatory-compliant money market fund on Stellar. Our platform will allow other investment managers the same opportunity without having to build software.

We've made quite a bit of progress and have generated interest from outside the current Stellar ecosystem. Our current project has hit the limit of where Soroban currently stands, and we're waiting for the js-stellar-base and js-soroban-client to be updated so that we can continue our development and production rollout. The project itself has been demonstrated to multiple option traders, their input has been collected, and design changes have been made to the original. The demonstrations have also yielded interest in option spreads and other "limited risk" derivatives.

We are currently on standby for ContractAuth and the Fees implementation for js-stellar-base and js-soroban-client. We helped identify some small shortcomings in the encoding and decoding of the xdr structures to scVals.

Block Time Financial's business model differs slightly from the current Stellar businesses. While we don't initially target underserved populations and markets, our plan to serve them in the future is there. We are striving to become a self-sustaining business, not relying on the SDF for continued funding. We don't aim to target the underserved for our revenue; rather, we focus on large US and Canadian institutional clients that can provide consistent income and productive use cases. We can then offer significantly reduced or free licenses of our platform for those that are underserved. This, of course, takes time and lots of money. My partner, Bruce Rosenheimer, and I have funded our company since 2017. We were able to complete a small "Friends and Family" financing round just before Meridian 2022 in Rome. David, Denelle, and I took a picture as we ceremoniously issued our equity asset on the Stellar blockchain. See the picture above. The continued operation of a US-based business catering to the financial services industry is expensive. Business insurance, required by all vendors, is very expensive for anything related to blockchain and "cryptocurrencies." Audits, accounting, legal and regulatory compliance all add to the overhead. Anke was right; we underestimated our expenses on the last round! While the burden is great, if think about it like this, if we can operate in the US, the most highly regulated market in the world, we should be good to go everywhere, worldwide.

Our current project is up and running. We will add option spreads to the smart contract and get as far along as possible with Soroban in regards to multi-party signing for a bi-lateral trade.

The design phase has already begun as there is a prototype in the python-sdk for ContractAuth. Fees seem to be moving along in development and should be finished by the end of May.

Our repo is located at:

https://github.com/blocktimefinancial/option

We try and commit to the repo at least a couple times per week.