Building an exchange for an asset that lives in a warehouse

Chief Technology Officer, LYQD

The problem

There's no centralised exchange for cask whiskey in Ireland. Casks regularly get bought and sold privately, and prices come from relationships and precedent, not from any published source. The paperwork proving what you own tends to sit in a filing cabinet at a bonded warehouse.

As a result, capital struggles to find a way in (you can't buy something if you don't know that it exists or if it's for sale), and owners have no dependable sense of what they're holding and how much it's worth. A buyer is trusting quite a lot: that the cask exists, that it holds what the seller says it holds, that the seller actually owns it, and that the price is somewhere near reasonable.

Software doesn't obviously fix this, because the asset stays physical. A cask doesn't necessarily move when it's sold. Digitising the transaction changes nothing about where the whiskey is or who's holding it. So an exchange here can't just be a marketplace with listings on it. It has to be a system of record that stays truthful about warehouses.

James, our CEO, describes the commercial goal of LYQD as earning trust by showing origin, pricing and ownership history. Those three things are the engineering problem.

What I built

I lead the technical side: the exchange platform, the infrastructure under it, and the roadmap that decides what gets built when.

The exchange handles listing, verification, trading and tracking of whole casks and storage units.

Then there's the trust layer. Onboarding and identity checks, payment and escrow, and asset-verification pipelines connecting a distillery or bonded warehouse to a holding in someone's portfolio. All of it exists because the buyer can't always go and look at what they're buying.

Reconciling the physical and digital sides is constant work. Warehouse records, cask documentation and physical verification all have to agree with what the platform says. When they don't, the platform is wrong. Building on that assumption changes a lot of design decisions.

Pricing is also a very complicated challenge. Age, volume, wood type, fill date and cask history all move the number, and the reference data is inconsistent or non-existent in some cases. Getting to a defensible model matters more than the interface on top of it.

I also own the technical roadmap, which sits alongside the company's operating strategy. That covers what gets built, what gets bought, what waits, and what the platform needs to handle before the business needs it to.

Where it is now

The exchange is live. Casks are listed, verified, traded and held through it, and holders get certificates recording what they own.

At one level the system is simple. Someone comes in through identity checks, finds a cask, buys it with the money held in escrow until the transfer is confirmed, and ends up with an asset they can see and act on.

Publicly that journey reads as discover, verify, own, mature, and sell. People arrive at it three ways: buying a cask outright, sourcing in bulk, or coming in as a private client with a portfolio behind them.

What's next

We're building a lot more on top of that. We see LYQD not just as an exchange, but as a component of trusted market infrastructure: a reliable record of what exists and who holds it, verification that stands up to scrutiny, settlement that completes properly every time, and enough consistency in how casks and units are described that they can be compared at all.

There's more to say about where this goes, and I'll write about it separately.

Why I like this work

The part I find most interesting is the fusion of the physical and the digital. There's a real cask, in a real warehouse, ageing in wood for years, and there's a record of it that has to stay honest about all of that. Getting those two things to line up is a better problem than either half on its own.

Whiskey is also a heritage business, working on a timescale software people aren't used to. The technology has to facilitate that - throwing software at a problem never works and we want to preserve the history of whiskey, not replace it.

And the whole thing only holds together if the trust layer is real. Identity, provenance, custody, settlement: they all have to stand up, because the buyer is relying on the system instead of inspecting the goods.

It's the same problem I work on in health research, in a completely different industry. Correctness is where you start, not where you finish.