# Building an Open Protocol for Originating Digital Assets (DIFO) — Ognjen Kurtic | Finspot

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2026-10-06
- Duration: 10:31
- Topics: People & Blogs
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-osD8oPsdIDk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osD8oPsdIDk

## Transcript

Hi, thank you. Pleasure being here. Uh let me check if it works. Yeah. So, so I'm I'm Odin Kitch. I co-founded Finsspot with uh two partners 2018. Uh I'm a software engineer by trade and I I got into blockchain like early 2017. And at the moment I realized what tokenization is, how you can uh tokenize things. I was I was interested in u uh how do you connect what you're how do you connect to the token to the asset that you're that you're you're tokenizing right and one of the first projects that we started researching it was called blockchain Lisa and the idea was to try to take a piece of art and uh do a high high resolution camera on it and then use the the the 3D information in the picture to encode that into the token so that you get real ownership of the artwork right and this talk is going going to be about exactly that concept but then applied to to to invoice financing which is the core core business of Finsspot. uh Finsspot is operating as a licensed factoring company in Serbia now also in Croatia since a year and we are uh quite rapidly expanding in the region and basically invoice financing is a seller uh selling an invoice to an invoice financing company towards a buyer so that they can get early payment right and then the buyer in the end is going to pay at maturity that invoice to the factoring company and the factoring company's basically taking a risk of 50 60 days usually for an invoice and they get a fee because they're taking that risk, right? The issue with invoice financing traditionally how it's being done is that it's really hard to scale it because you need, as you can imagine, you need to do a lot of checks when you want to buy one invoice and then you need to repeat all those checks for each paper invoice, right? So, so it's really uh hard to do it on scale and and on the other hand, it's really a interesting product formemes because that's the best way to get financing when you're a young company, right? If you have a good depth or a good buyer that accepts invoice financing, you can easily get funded based on their risk. Right? So the process was uh moved as technology came was moved from paper and into digital platforms uh which obviously helped right to to scale to scale to scale invoice financing. But the issue remained the same in a way that now previously you would have a paper representation of an invoice of a transaction on an invoice right we move that into Excels and we move that into database columns right but the underlying problem remain the same the problem that when you see a fact for example the invoice due date is on the 25th of August you need somehow to verify that fact right if it's in a piece of paper or a database column it doesn't really matter right and what we saw that with the rise of the cryptographic technologies mostly that that evolved mostly during this period of the last 10 to 15 years actually what you could do now you could introduce independent verifiability right and this is the core of the innovation that we are introducing with a project called defo that we that we executed a pilot with together with international finance corporation here in Serbia Romania basically what we do is we take the invoice origination process right when we are buying an invoice, we need to verify the identity of the seller. Has the buyer accepted that invoice? What is the buyer credit score? Is there insurance? Blah blah blah. You have like bazillion of these steps. And for each of those steps we execute, it's just a business rule that's being executed. But the core requirement of that business rule, it needs to produce a proof. It needs to be independently verifiable. And usually you do that against some kind of a public infrastructure. It can be a smart contract on a blockchain, right? But it can also be other kinds of infrastructure that allows for independent verifiability, X509 certificates, verifiable LEI and things like that, right? And you keep only the proofs and proof verification on chain so that anybody can verify, but you keep the sensitive data still in your silo. So you're not breaking the business rules and the business secrets that are that need to be preserved for this business to for this business to work. Uh so what we did as part of that pilot, it's not really a good resolution, but this represents the full invoice origination process in Serbia. What we did the green boxes are the things that facts that we managed to capture in an independent verifiable way. The seller identity, the fact that the buyer has accepted an invoice, the fact that invoice has been verified against the national invoicing platform that we have operating here in Serbia. that the fact that legal notification an email has been sent to a specific address at a specific point in time with specific content and the fact that this invoice was checked against double financing in u against the national register for double financing. So these facts are captured through zero knowledge circuits and out of these facts we produced a digital asset. It's a self-contained JSON document containing these facts and containing crucially the mechanism how you verify these facts so that you can have a script machine-driven due diligence that can verify those proofs on chain independently of the originator. Meaning that you are decoupling the asset from whoever originated it. meaning that you can now natively input that into uh your tokenization protocol, your real world asset tokenization protocol or any other kind of instrument, right? And that's the critical part that goes back to blockchain Lisa, right? We try to tackle the origination that link through independent peripherability, zero knowledge proofs and other and other technologies. Once you do that, all of these steps right the the seller identity, the buyer acceptance, the double financing, it's all all these credentials, how we call them, they are produced by separate issuers. It can be a private entity, it can be a government entity, it can be anybody who is who is working on that data. Which means that when you compile an asset out of that, they provide a credential and they can have their payment address for the part of the asset that they that they're exposing. Meaning that when there is settlement against that asset in a your regular traditional waterfall, you settle with microp payments those those providers, right? So they're they get a new business model, how to monetize their data, how to be exposed to to to to inways financing. As that asset travels through the chain of you know the originator buying it and then selling it to another fund who then sells it on a secondary market, the information inside remains the same. Meaning that whoever provides the credential to the risk of that asset is constantly collecting microp payments based on the life cycle of that asset. And that really exposes a lot of new monetization rails for the commercial entities that are currently currently in this space. Uh and what happens in the end right the the asset is the invoice is bought by Finsspot. It's being transferred into this digital asset through through DFO protocol and then it's being sold in an SPV traditional SPV structure to a funer who sits behind us right and then the payment comes into the SPV from the buyer. The payment still comes through the regular rails like it's just an eban. It's just a banking interface. So the buyer and the seller they don't see any kind of change but inside of the SPV that payment is switched into a euro stable coin and then it just settles the asset programmatically. Everybody who participated in the creation of that asset gets a microp payment. the originator Finsspot, the funer who provided the principle, the credential providers who provided information about the day risking of that asset. Everybody gets settled in an automated workflow and the life cycle is over, right? And this allows for a lot of efficiency in the invoice financing space and it allows for these assets to continue to travel from the funer to to another funer without without necessary bureaucracy and operational burden. Right? So we are really really careful how to introduce this into the markets right we did a pilot which is successfully completed in Serbia and Romania where we just showed together with international finance corporation and some other funds how this technology can work how we can capture information independently verifiable manner from various from various data sources. We are now in a stage where we are deploying a first production case in in Croatia where we will be having these funds really funding the asset, right? But we are really cra care careful to keep the outside interface completely the same for the clients, for the sellers and the buyers, right? Because they they are not used to stable coins. They don't want to think about stable coins, blockchains and so on. the settlement where we introduce these novelties is happening inside of that structure that SPV which is like the first iteration of how you introduce it to the market and then the next stage is to tokenize because you have now a baseline of an asset which is independently verifiable in a machine-driven way. You can take a portfolio of these assets and you can plug it into a real world asset tokenization protocol, right? where you can have funds coming globally into an asset that they can underwrite which means that it's not just a piece of paper stating that I don't know the grade is a or whatever right so you are taking an invoice a piece of paper and you're making it globally liquid through this link of independent verifiability uh after the tokenization after the successful execution of the creation deployment we then want to incubate use cases across the globe we're already talking to to originators in Malaysia, talking to originator in Turkey, talking to Indian originators who are all interested something like this. We want to replicate that successful case and try on a multiple use case to try to introduce this new asset class to the market. I have a feeling that a lot there there was a phase transition sometimes last year or this year when you think about the regulators how they see these things and you can see a lot of potential in this space right now and I think it's a really really good place to be building right now. I'm going to stop here and take questions if there are any. Thank you.