The American Depositary and Settlement Agency(DTCC), which settled most of the securities in the United States, is completing the pilot phase of its flagship block chain project.
In an interview with Coindsk, DTCC reported that it had completed an early version of a block chain that would support a $11 trillion credit derivatives transaction. This milestone represents significant progress in the development of the block chain in this clearing centre, but also marks the fact that the largest block chain effort has not yet transferred the existing financial infrastructure to the block chain.
In January, the DTC's block chain project made its first public appearance in an effort to upgrade the underlying infrastructure of DTCC's centralised OTC derivatives trade information warehouse(TIW) and reduce the time taken for derivatives transactions to be cleared from weeks(in some cases) to almost instantaneous. To achieve this goal, DTCC has established partnerships with technology giant IBM, enterprise block chain alliance R3, and venture banker-supported block chain startup Axoni.
Now, as this large-scale implementation is completed, these partners are turning their attention to testing and preparing to migrate TIW data in a compatible manner.
Just before the planned launch date, DTCC's chief technology architect Rob Palatnick tried to see any obstacles ahead as a sign of progress.
"What's exciting is that the overall application and environmental progress has been reassuring," he told Coindesk. Although there have been some challenges, we think this is just 'noise in the process of progress'. "
Palatnick also publicly revealed for the first time that Axoni's AxCore protocol originally originated from the Etaifang public block chain, and the DTCC system uses the same Solid smart contract language to create applications.
However, AxCore has been modified and a modular consensus mechanism has been added that can customize services to meet the specific needs of DTCC and submit real-time reports to regulators and other counterparties.
A representative of Axoni said: "This is a huge improvement in situational awareness for individual companies, regulators and the industry as a whole. "
Unlike Etherfield, DTCC's AxCore implementation does not use a token-but Axoin and Palatnick confirm that the system is still powered by a "gas" form. This means that there will be a parallel way to pay transaction fees on the Ethernet block chain.
Although Etifang is the most widely used block chain protocol in the development of these enterprise-level implementations, DTCC said that there are still some difficulties or complications.
For one thing, etherfield's business logic is not as complex as the DTCC needs -- mainly because it is difficult to identify decimals, which is necessary for the project.
Palatnick said: "There are exceptions to everything. There are always many subtle differences between things, which means that the ability of this technology and the ability to use Ethernet smart contracts need to solve the functional problems of the business. "
In the early days, in order to solve this problem, DTCC believed that most of the actual business process workflow needed to be carried out "under the chain", greatly reducing the role of block chains in storing settlement data. In this way, Palatnick said, "We don't do a lot of business logic in smart contract language."
However, after several months of construction, developers find that they are actually introducing more complexity by executing the workflow under the chain. Therefore, Etheric star coin(ETS) was born
Palatnick said: "We finally returned to the original path and put more business logic on the chain. He also pointed out that it is a challenge to understand which information needs to be processed on the chain and which processes need to be conducted under the chain.
The behind-the-scenes work is scheduled to go live in the second quarter of 2018, provided everything goes according to plan.
But before that, additional tests and a series of integrations -- both TIW itself and external institutions -- are needed.
DTCC is working with regulators to align Axoni's built-in reporting database with regulators 'needs. According to Palatnick, these reports must be as good as they are and can also be used as a functional result of smart contracts on a continuing basis.
In addition, Palatnick said that DTCC is working with R3 and its network of more than 100 global financial institutions to learn from standard setters how to create standards that "revolve around what data on distributed books looks like."
After this project is officially launched, Axoin intends to open its Axcore protocol.
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