Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) Plans To Completely Move on Blockchain By 2021

27. Aug 2019 Posted by Akolkar B on News

According to the latest development, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is working on shifting its operations on a blockchain platform. The official press release on Monday, August 26, notes that ASK has signed a ‘three-party memorandum of understanding (MoU)’ with VMWare and Digital Asset (DA).

As per the MoU, the three companies will be working together on DLT initiatives taking place in Australia and New Zealand. While working with these two partners, ASX plans to implement blockchain to its registry, settlement and clearing systems (CHESS).

Peter Hiom, ASX Deputy CEO, said: “This new partnership is a very positive development that will help us support a wider range of DLT solutions developed by the industry. It confirms our belief in the potential of DLT as we remain on track to deliver the CHESS replacement system in March-April 2021.”

The press release states that using the blockchain tech will help to bolster ASX’s “ data privacy, confidentiality and security requirements at greater scale”. Besides, it will also help  in the development and support for the company’s open source smart contract programming language - DAML.

Digital Assets, the company which specializes in developing the DLT solution, is ASX’s technology partner for CHESS and DAML. On the other hand, VMWare provides infrastructure and virtualization solutions to ASX.

ASX says that the replacement to the existing CHESS system will help to create new financial services industry standards along with the new infrastructure and innovation for clearing and settlement.

ASX’s Customer Development Environment has already started the development of the software for the blockchain-based system replacing the CHESS. ASX notes that some its service providers and customers have already started using the clearing and settlement functionalities available on the new system.

Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, said: “We continue to achieve our milestones to deliver a production-grade, scalable distributed ledger solution for CHESS. VMware is now part of the mission we share with ASX to deliver a DAML-based distributed infrastructure to realize the full potential of this technology.”