Grygo is the chief content officer for FTF & FTF News.
When the bragging goes quiet on Wall Street, you know the serious talk has begun.
This has been the case with blockchain/distributed ledger technology (DLT). The hype evaporated pretty fast when the securities industry began to seriously test the glibly christened savior of disruptive technologies. Banks, exchanges, hedge funds, vendors, and everything else in between have been putting DLT through its paces to see if it holds up to hype.
Although not exactly on Wall Street, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has also been exploring DLT and has been transparent about its explorations (and other matters). In fact, ASX has just announced that “Synfini,” the ASX’s “DLT as a Service” platform is “production ready.”
Synfini “uses the same underlying technology as ASX’s CHESS replacement, but is offered as a cloud service, allowing flexibility and scalability to ASX’s customers as their usage grows,” ASX officials say.
ASX officials add that they have lined up “the first set of new customers to Synfini, who will deploy a range of DLT-powered solutions over the coming months.”
Since January 2021, when ASX officials began pushing a sandpit for the development of “DLT as a service” offerings, “more than 20 firms have ‘jumped in’ to explore the Daml [Digital Asset Modeling Language] smart contract language … for building multi-party applications. It extracts and simplifies business processes to make data accessible and optimizes workflows using smart contracts,” according to Paul Stonham, general manager business development, ASX DLT Solutions, in a prepared statement.
The open source Daml can help yield applications that stay coordinated and let users “have access to reliable, real-time information and transaction status at all times,” Stonham says.
In fact, Synfini — name that combines synchronization and infinite possibility — “is a full service blockchain technology offering powered by VMware Blockchain. It provides customers with access to ASX’s DLT infrastructure, data hosting, ledger services and support,” according to ASX officials.
“This eliminates the need for organizations to build, run and support their own environment, reducing cost, complexity and risk,” Stonham says.
“Each party has invite-only and permissioned access to a synchronized and real-time immutable audit trail. This improves the accuracy of information and workflows, thereby reducing delays and the need for additional manual reconciliation,” according to ASX. “Automated consent management and sovereignty to data owners ensures each party sees only the data on the ledger that they have permission to access. The platform’s committer nodes sit across several data centers and leverages Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) technology, ensuring reliability and integrity for all parties in each workflow.”
ASX officials notes that some of the early adopters of Synfini are:
- Broadridge Financial Solutions, “which is developing an application that automates and eliminates paper for off-market transfers in the equities market;”
- And Boulevard, “which is building an ownership register for private companies. DigitalX will host its Drawbridge app on Synfini, a regtech application that helps companies reduce employee and director securities trading risks by automating the approval process,” according to ASX.
So, DLT may soon start to deliver on its promises.
More about the ASX effort can be found here: https://bit.ly/3qPQqnj
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