Coming off a year of high growth, enterprise blockchain startup Symbiont on Wednesday closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by Nasdaq Ventures, with participation from new investors including Galaxy Digital, Citi Ventures, and Raptor Group.

Backing from Wall Street may be an indicator that traditional financial players are still warm to blockchain and digital ledger technology, at least for institutional applications, despite a rough and tumble 2018 for the crypto world in general. Symbiont, founded in 2013, seemed to have dodged the bullet, doubling in size in 2018 from about 30 employees to about 60 employees.

Adam Krellenstein, CTO and co-founder of Symbiont, told Bank Innovation the company will use the latest funding to build up its workforce and bulk up its platform, Assembly. This includes deployments across multiple business verticals, including data management, mortgages, private equity, and syndicated loans.

He said the company aims to build a more efficient, transparent and safe infrastructure for the financial services industry and the end user through blockchain and smart contracts, which dictate how certain financial instruments behave in different scenarios, automatically, without a third party.

“Our solution is an end-to-end product, not just an open-source, barebones framework for building an application,” Krellenstein said. “Assembly actually is a complete product designed to solve very real immediate needs of the industry.”

Krellenstein said there’s “a ton of demand” for smart contracts, but it’s pent up.

“The financial industry, for a very long time, has relied upon a broken infrastructure at the foundational layer,” he said. “There’s been a lot of innovation in the front office within finance for a number of decades, but the back office has lagged behind.”

To illustrate, he said a lot of the communication that occurs in finance today is point-to-point and ad hoc. “I send a message to you, you send a message to someone else, but we get reconciliation errors there, and other operational issues, because of the way these communications are handled,” he said.

Assembly, Krellenstein said, allows for the creation of “truly decentralized networks” that can act as a single source of truth for the industry and provide a robust, secure foundation for the marketplace. He touted the platform’s smart contract system “designed for managing very, very complex multi-party workloads” and a privacy model that uses end-to-end encryption within the platform “to ensure that no data is ever seen by anyone that’s not supposed to be seeing it.”

Increased blockchain adoption was a popular prediction for this year. As Bank Innovation previously reported, Lisa Frazier, head of innovation for Wells Fargo & Co., said she expected to see more proofs of concept around blockchain and DLT in 2019, including within Wells Fargo.

“I’m not talking about crypto,” she said. “I’m talking about the actual application of the technology.”

Frazier will deliver a presentation at Bank Innovation Ignite in Seattle in March 2019. Click here to register.