For trade finance and commodities
Payment against documents, enforced at the token.
Release on presentation, inspection or milestone — with the money never leaving the banks involved.
The pain today
The oldest pain in finance is conditional payment.
Letters of credit, documentary collections and escrow all exist to make payment depend on something happening — and all of them take people, days and a holder in the middle. Cross-border adds a correspondent chain and an FX leg that settles later.
The primitive that removes it
A rule instead of a holder; two legs instead of a chain. The condition — documents presented, goods inspected, milestone signed — becomes a rule the policy engine enforces at the token; nobody holds the money in between. A warehouse receipt or commodity register plugs in as an asset leg, so title and payment move together. The FX leg settles payment-versus-payment on two central banks' ledgers.
What stays, what changes, what never happens
What stays the same
Your trade documents, your banks, your inspection agents, your commodity registers. The bank is still the bank; the goods are still the goods.
What changes
Conditions encoded as rules; registers connected as asset legs; counterparties settling on the rail; FX quoted by member banks.
What you never take on
A stablecoin, an escrow agent, a correspondent chain, a bridge. Nothing that requires the trader to hold a private token.
The board question
“Who decides the condition is met?”
Whoever decides it today — the inspector, the bank, the platform — signs the attestation the rule waits for. The protocol changes who holds the money while waiting, not who judges the goods.
What it costs
For a bank: issuer terms. For a trading house or platform: participant API USD 2–25K a month; settlement fees under the published formula; asset-leg terms for a register operator. Indicative; your figures go in the joint business case.
See the full fee schedulePut one letter of credit on the rail.
A documentary release with an inspection attestation, and the FX leg settled payment-versus-payment, run end to end in the sandbox with your trade-finance desk.