Jacek Janczura Founder-CTO · Enterprise AI
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Case study · Central banking, development finance and supply chain

Regulated distributed systems: data sovereignty for institutions that cannot centralise

Four deliveries for institutions that need shared data without a shared owner: a cross-ledger bridge for Norges Bank, a development-finance platform on federated context brokers, an auditable carbon-capture supply chain, and a marketplace where models are trained on data nobody hands over.

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Client engagement · via Jaden Data / JadenX MVP

Mandate

Technical lead on the Norges Bank cross-ledger bridge, and lead architect and delivery owner on the development-finance platform, the supply-chain trust platform and the confidential-computing marketplace — accountable for the design and for delivering each to the customer.

Key decisions

  1. Federate rather than centralise: every stakeholder runs their own context broker and data moves through policies and subscriptions, so no single party controls the record.
  2. Run the innovation work as a start-up inside the institution — wireframes validated with stakeholders first, code only for what they valued — and open-source the result with the client.
  3. Use the ledger only where it earns its place: checksums of digital twins, certificates and audit trails, while the working data stays in the brokers and inside trusted execution environments.

Outcome — measured

4 systems delivered: a bridge, two platform MVPs and an open-source marketplace
Min. 30% revenue increase for carbon-capture supply-chain participants Projected
GPL-3.0 development-finance platform published open source in agreement with the client
Donor interest from a major foundation and development organisations in co-creating the platform Qualitative
Stakeholders
  • Norges Bank, exploring programmable money
  • A development bank and its funders and partner organisations
  • Biomass producers, logistics, pyrolysis and storage operators in a carbon-capture chain
  • Consortium partners and EU programme reviewers
  • Legal and compliance stakeholders in each engagement
Constraints
  • Data sovereignty: no central controlling entity acceptable to the participants
  • EU funding programmes with fixed scopes and review gates
  • Several organisations owning different parts of one end-to-end flow
  • Legal review running alongside the build
Reuse
  • Context-broker federation patterns for decentralised data
  • Digital-twin and certificate models for supply chains
  • Confidential-computing workflow: preparation → agreement → execution → evaluation
  • Parallel tech, business and legal sub-tracks inside an agile delivery

Context

Four engagements share one problem: several organisations need to act on the same data, none of them will accept another as the owner of it, and a regulator is watching. Distributed ledgers and federated data infrastructure are the mechanism here, not the headline.

Business problem

Norges Bank wanted to understand whether value can move between two different ledgers. A German development bank needed funders, implementers and auditors to coordinate on projects without a single institution controlling the record. A carbon-capture chain needed every participant to trust a certificate issued by someone else. And organisations with sensitive data wanted analytical work done on it without handing it over.

My mandate

I was technical lead on the Norges Bank bridge, and lead architect and delivery owner on the other three: I designed the solutions and was accountable for delivering them to the customer’s expectations.

Decisions

  • Cross-ledger bridge (2022–2023, technical lead). For Norges Bank, a bridge between IOTA and Ethereum for central bank digital currency, exploring programmable money and cross-chain interoperability for sovereign currencies. This work involved no AI.
  • Development-finance platform MVP. A React front end over a FIWARE Orion context broker with Java components and Auth0 for identity. Storage is decentralised: ideally every stakeholder runs their own broker, with federation and replication through policies and subscriptions to data changes, so no central entity controls the record. FIWARE was chosen as an open, EU-backed component ecosystem that avoids vendor lock-in.
  • Lean start-up inside the institution. Twelve sprints over three months, run with lean learning loops and pivot-or-persist decisions: illustrative wireframes validated with stakeholders first, progressively replaced by functional prototypes, and only features stakeholders valued got built. The result was published open source under GPL-3.0 in agreement with the client.
  • Auditable supply chain. A trust platform on the FIWARE context broker, extended with new modules: every asset represented as a digital twin with checksums on the ledger for verification, iSHARE for inter-organisational exchange, and emission certificates issued as NFTs so they can be traded and traced. Delivery ran as parallel sub-tracks — technical, business and legal — because the contributors owned different parts of one end-to-end flow.
  • Confidential computing marketplace. For inter-organisational data processing, a modular microservices design (agreement, execution, user management, matchmaking, audit and payment) with Ethereum smart contracts for authorisation and tamper-proof audit trails, Intel SGX trusted execution environments through iExec, and AES-256 at rest with key management inside the enclave. The pattern is bringing the code to the data, so a freelance data scientist can build a model on private data without ever controlling access to it.

Delivery

The development-finance MVP shipped a projects marketplace, discussion templates, threaded discussions and dashboard data, in twelve sprints over three months. The supply-chain platform ran an end-to-end proof of concept covering biomass verification, pyrolysis transformation, independent lab analysis and certificate issuance, over ten two-week iterations. The marketplace was released as an open-source MVP with a co-authored whitepaper. Three of the four were funded under EU Horizon 2020 programmes.

Outcome

The development-finance platform reached product-market fit, was published open source under GPL-3.0 in agreement with the client, and drew interest from the Gates Foundation in improving coordination of development work, with representatives from the bank, Co-Develop, UNDP and Norad indicating interest in co-creating it; a separate alignment initiative grew out of the project. The supply-chain platform delivered a working auditing platform for the carbon capture value chain, with a minimum 30% revenue increase projected for participants through optimised operations and certificate trading. The marketplace shipped as an open-source MVP with a peer-reviewed publication.

Reuse

Context-broker federation, digital twins with on-ledger checksums, the confidential-computing workflow and the parallel tech/business/legal sub-track setup are patterns I have reused since, including in later work where the sensitive part was AI rather than a ledger.

Evidence

The open-source release, the funding programmes, the publication and the expressions of interest are public record. The 30% revenue increase is a projection made for the supply-chain participants, not a measured result. The Norges Bank engagement was a distributed-systems project with no AI component.

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