NPEX: A Securities Trading and Administration Platform, Built End to End
Dusk designed and built a complete securities trading and administration platform for NPEX, the AFM-licensed Dutch securities exchange. It is the system a venue runs on: the software that takes in investor orders, runs the market, keeps the record of who owns what, settles trades and produces the reporting a regulated exchange has to deliver. Dusk built it end to end and delivered it in 2026.
NPEX runs a regulated market for shares and bonds, serving around 20,000 investors and the companies that raise capital there. A venue like that runs on one core system: the onboarding and checks that decide who may trade, the order book and how trades are matched, the ledger of each investor's cash and holdings, settlement with banks and custodians, and the records regulators expect. Rebuilding it means rebuilding the foundation of the market.
What the platform does
It covers the full path from an investor signing up to a settled trade.
- Onboarding and access. Investors pass KYC and AML checks before they can trade, and access is role-based for both investors and the exchange's own staff.
- Trading. An order-driven market with a matching engine that applies clear, repeatable price and time priority, plus the order validation, market states and halts a regulated venue needs.
- The ledger. A double-entry record of every investor's cash and securities positions, where each balance change traces to a single event, so holdings can always be reconciled and explained.
- Settlement and reconciliation. Trades carry through to settlement across banks and custodians, with internal records checked against external ones and any breaks surfaced for resolution.
- Compliance and reporting. The transaction and reference-data reporting a regulated market files, backed by an audit trail that can reconstruct activity from the underlying records.
- Portal and backoffice. An investor portal for balances, orders, trades and subscriptions, and an operations backoffice where the venue administers instruments, accounts and interventions under maker-checker control.
Regulated-market infrastructure, delivered
Running a regulated exchange is, in large part, software: the trading, settlement, compliance and operational machinery behind the market. Dusk built that machinery for a licensed European venue, to the controls and auditability a regulated market demands, and delivered it as a working platform: the market infrastructure regulated finance runs on. The relationship runs deep. NPEX appointed Dusk's CEO, Emanuele Francioni, as its non-executive CTO in October 2024.
Dusk builds that infrastructure across regulated finance, for the exchanges, issuers and financial institutions bringing real assets on-chain. The NPEX platform is the venue side of that work; BWRE Capital's tokenized bond, which Dusk tokenized and built end to end, is the instrument side. The same capability runs through native issuance, trading venues and secondary markets, and the wider partnership with NPEX on regulated markets.
Most of this work starts the same way, with a team that has an instrument to issue or a market to run and needs the infrastructure to do it under real regulation. That is the kind of work Dusk takes on, from a single tokenized instrument to a full trading venue. Teams weighing it can talk to Dusk.
