Run your own permissioned market, where every trade still has to pass the token's compliance rules to deliver. A tokenised security that trades on an outside platform leaves the issuer checking transfer restrictions after the fact and rebuilding the trade record from someone else's files. DALP 3.2 adds venues that you operate, with order books, auctions, a trading calendar and settlement through the venue's own escrow.
A venue is a market you operate, and the token decides every delivery
Each venue has its own members, admission rules, calendar, fee schedule and escrow. The Console calls each tradable pair on a venue, such as BOND/USDC, an instrument, with its own order book, price band and holding period. DALP does not bring liquidity to a venue, so you bring the members and the order flow.
- Market structure
- Order book and call auctions
- Settlement
- Venue escrow, then the token's own rules
- Custodian role
- Lent to the operations signer for one bust reversal, then revoked
- Venues
- As many as your business needs
Before and after
Before 3.2: secondary trading in a tokenised security meant listing it on someone else's platform or matching buyers and sellers by hand. Eligibility was checked off the book, settlement and the register were reconciled afterwards, and the exchange's surveillance, tax and record-keeping duties were met from exports.
With 3.2: A venue admits members against the claims it requires, matches orders continuously or in auctions on the calendar you set, and settles each trade through its escrow and each token's normal transfer path. The venue sends its surveillance provider a copy of every order and trade over FIX, the Financial Information eXchange protocol, records VAT on every fee line and keeps its records for the period you set, apart from anything under a legal hold.
One order on a venue runs from admission through escrow and matching to delivery under the token's own compliance rules.
Admit only the members each venue accepts
Admission decides who can trade, and a private instrument decides who can see it. You can run as many venues as you need, for example one for retail members and one for institutional desks, or one per jurisdiction. Each venue admits members against the identity claims it requires, and an admitted-only venue refuses orders from anyone it has not admitted. The instruments of an admitted-only venue, public ones included, stay out of market lists and cannot be opened by anyone the venue has not admitted, so make an instrument private only when named participants within the venue should see it. A restricted bond distribution then runs as a private instrument with a full trade record.
Your venue team watches each order on the venue and its status.
When one wallet must leave one instrument, an organisation owner or a platform administrator opens “Barred wallets” on that instrument's settings, chooses Bar wallet and records the reason. The wallet's resting orders on that instrument are cancelled, the instrument disappears from that wallet's market lists and data, and a new order is refused with “Your access to this instrument is disabled”, while its orders elsewhere stay. An organisation owner acting on a compliance officer's alert stops one wallet trading one instrument in one step, with the reason on record. On an instance SettleMint operates, a platform administrator may be SettleMint staff. A bar applies to a wallet and to one instrument, so keeping one person off it means barring every wallet that person holds, and stopping a wallet holding or receiving the token takes a freeze or the token's block list.
Open, trade and close on a calendar you set
An instrument trades continuously or on a trading calendar with session hours, holidays and half days. Auction-only instruments, and public instruments with a session, open with a call auction that clears at one price, at a random instant inside a published window. Each close sets an official closing price, and optional price bands keep orders and auction prices within a range of a reference price. A public continuous instrument can end the day with a closing auction, which collects orders and crosses them at one price that becomes the official close, and then a Trade at last session, where orders trade only at the last price. A venue operator who sees a disorderly market can halt or suspend one instrument and later resume it, and a halt also suspends its scheduled auctions while the same pair on another venue keeps trading. An operator can also switch on an automatic volatility interruption for one instrument, which stays off until it is set: when a trade would print further from the reference price than the threshold, continuous trading stops for a set time, then one single-price auction clears the book and trading resumes. The instrument header, the market data stream, the FIX drop copy and the audit log all show when it starts and ends. A private continuous instrument has no opening auction and no Trade at last session, and delisting is permanent.
Sign a fee limit that covers every fill
An order that fills in many small pieces pays a fixed fee on each piece. The venue prices the most an order can be charged across all its fills, using the instrument's fee schedule, the venue's on-chain order and settlement fees and any VAT it collects on chain, and requires the order to sign a fee limit that covers it. The Console and the Investor portal sign that limit and reserve the cash for it. An order whose worst case exceeds the venue's 10% maximum is refused with fee-, so no order can park at settlement for lack of fee room.
Let the token's rules decide every delivery
A resting order is backed by a lock in the venue's escrow, whether the asset is a DALP token or a plain ERC-20 stablecoin. When a trade delivers, both legs move through each token's normal transfer path, so the token's compliance rules decide whether the delivery goes through, and a holding period of up to 30 days can keep both legs reserved after a fill. A broker's client who lost an eligibility claim after placing an order cannot walk away from the trade: the token still refuses the payout to that client, so the venue books the refused leg to the client's free balance in the escrow and the trade counts as delivered. The client withdraws it once verified again, and cannot sell it on the venue before that. Only an outside cause undoes a trade at delivery: a paused token, a custodian-shrunk trade lock, a frozen sending side, or a receiver the issuer put on the compliance bypass list during the holding period. On an instrument with a holding period, a fill is refused when a buyer, seller or fee recipient is the zero address, the escrow or a bypass-listed address. An operator can bust an erroneous trade within 24 hours. When your organisation turns on the Trading venues row of its approval policy, a second venue operator decides the bust, and the operator who proposed it cannot decide it. Until then a proposed bust goes ahead without a second operator.
The venue contract holds no custodian role. Listing grants no custodian role. When the person approving a bust may grant it, DALP lends your organisation's operations signer the custodian role on each token of the trade that your organisation issued, and on chain that role can freeze and force-transfer any holder's balance. DALP uses it only to reverse a delivered trade after a bust, and revokes it from both tokens when the reversal ends, whether it completed or failed. A token listed before this change still carried the role its listing granted, and DALP takes that back too: the operations signer gives it back once the chain's role matches the grant the organisation's own queue recorded for that listing, and a role a token admin granted is never touched. It waits while a bust on one of the token's markets is approved, executing or failed, and sends a failed renounce again under a new request key, up to eight attempts. Reversing a delivered trade is a forced transfer, which skips the transfer rules by design. A delivered trade with a leg in a token you did not issue, such as a plain ERC-20 stablecoin, cannot be reversed, and a wallet on the compliance bypass list, which a compliance manager and DALP's own factories can add to, skips the transfer checks.
Set limits and starting values once for the whole venue
A venue admin can limit the order types and time in force that every instrument on the venue accepts, listed instruments included, from the venue's Listing rules page. Orders already resting stay on the book. The same page holds starting values for the maker and taker fee, the fee account, the market-order protection band and the holding period. The listing wizard opens with them filled in, and a listed instrument keeps its own value. A limit that would leave a listed instrument with no order type or time in force is refused.
Group the order book by a price step that fits the instrument
The order book on the Console and the Investor portal trading screens has a “Price step” control. It offers the instrument's own price step and then 2, 5, 10, 50 and 100 of them, each named by the price it adds up to, so a trader can read a thin book at the level that suits it. On a book whose levels sit far apart, the options move up by powers of ten so that the coarsest one still merges neighbouring levels. Each bucket sits on a multiple of the step, with bids rounded down and asks rounded up, and shows the summed size of the levels inside it.
Show each party only its own side
The venue's Orders table shows operators the trading member behind each order, and an operator assigns a broker to a participant from the participant's access page. A broker change applies to later orders only, so an earlier order, trade or held fill keeps the member it had at the time. In the Console and the API, traders and brokers never see who is on the other side of a trade, and their blotter shows only their own orders and fees. Operators publish and schedule announcements, traders set price alerts, and your systems get a signed webhook for each settled trade and each fee it charged, for venue orders and announcements, and for corporate actions announced, paid or completed, all marked beta in the event reference. Venues, instruments, orders, busts and reports are on the versioned API, where an instrument is called a market. Orders, market data and venue reads have matching TypeScript SDK operations, while venue setup, busts and report replay are called over HTTP from the API reference. The public trades read shows both sides' fee breakdown to anyone who can see the instrument, without naming either party, and the trade event on chain names both wallets.
Charge VAT on venue fees and keep records as long as the law asks
The VAT policy of a new venue starts at 5% on fees, and each buyer and seller fee line records its VAT separately from the fee in trades, settlements, statements and fee reports. With “Collect VAT on chain” and a “VAT recipient” set, settlement pays both sides' VAT to that account in the same transaction as the trade and the fee, so tax owed never settles apart from the trade. A venue administrator can list participants that pay no VAT, and every change to the policy follows the venue's Trading venues approval row.
Data retention on the venue's listing rules sets how many years the venue keeps orders, order events and trades, from 1 to 100, and a monthly run copies expired, settled records to an append-only archive before it deletes them from the venue. “Legal holds” keep records of one venue, instrument, participant or time window out of that run, and with the organisation's “Reporting” approval row on, releasing a hold takes a request and a second person's approval. A venue with no retention period keeps everything, and its records leave only once an administrator previews and saves a period. The VAT model covers one standard rate and zero-rated participants, and with the Reporting approval row off, which is the default, one person's request releases a legal hold at once.
Feed your surveillance provider over FIX
A venue can send a live FIX 5.0 SP2 drop copy to a surveillance provider: every accepted order, replacement, fill, cancel, expiry and bust becomes an execution report, and halts, resumes, session changes and official closes become market reports, in order. After a trading day ends, an operator can preview and replay that day's reports, and export the day's end-of-day surveillance files per asset class once every trade and approved bust has settled. One of the surveillance file types is an optional export, off by default, and needs the deployment's exchange settings. The drop copy session is set in the deployment's configuration and stays off until the team that runs your deployment enables it, and replay and file export run through the API, with no Console screen. The venue's FIX session only sends reports and takes no orders. Members place and cancel orders through the Console and the API, and each order carries the member wallet's signature.
Stop orders that hold their balance
Traders can place stop orders beside limit and market orders. The venue reserves the balance when the stop is placed and holds it while the stop waits, so a stop never fails for lack of funds at the moment it fires. When the instrument trades at the trigger price, the stop joins the order book as a limit order at the price the trader set. A trader cancels an armed stop from the open orders to release the balance.
Upgrading
Venues are new in 3.2 and run only once the team that runs your deployment, your platform team or SettleMint on an instance it operates, switches secondary trading on, together with the FIX drop copy where your surveillance provider needs it, as decide which capabilities your deployment runs and the deployment reference describe. Integrations that read venue events should expect each read to name only the caller's own side of a trade, unless the caller operates the venue, and an instrument's session state can be trade-at-last, as Trading venue reads describes. Approval rules start off, so an organisation that wants a second person on busts and venue changes turns on the Trading venues row of its approval policy.
Why it matters
- Banks: you can run a private distribution or a members-only market for your clients' securities, with every delivery checked by the token's own rules.
- Exchanges, CSDs and market infrastructures: order books, auctions, an official close, FIX drop copy, VAT on fees and record retention come on a venue you operate.
- Regulators: each trade delivers through the token's compliance rules, apart from a wallet on the compliance bypass list and a reversal after a bust, which is a forced transfer one operator can propose until the Trading venues approval row is on. Every bar and hold carries a reason, and the surveillance provider sees each event as the venue records it.