Wall Street giant DTCC launches private blockchain platform for faster trades

According to a press release made today, the New York-based post-trade financial services company, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), which processes all trades in the US stock market, has launched a private blockchain project called Project Ion aimed at settling trades more quickly for clients.

The DTCC acts as the counterparty for the majority of trades in the US and it supports the entire public securities market.

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DTCC’s Project Ion

Project Ion was first created as a pilot program in 2020 before moving to the development phase in September of the same year.

As of now, Project Ion processes an average of more than 100,000 bilateral equity transactions per day in a parallel processing environment using distributed ledger technology. On a peak day, the transactions processed by the blockchain can go to as high as 160,000 transactions per day.

Project Ion is designed to support end-of-day (T+0) settlement cycles leveraging blockchain technology.

At the moment, stock market trades across the stock markets take an average of two days to settle. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has however proposed speeding the transactions up in February in the wake of the highly volatile meme stock market.

Last year, Robinhood (HOOD) CEO Vlad Tenev said that the introduction of the T+0 settlement would go a long way in preventing volatile markets like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc (NYSE:AMC) and GameStop Corp (NYSE:GME),.

The DTCC’s blockchain project is however private and permissioned unlike many popular blockchain networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin. DTCC is developing the project in collaboration with the likes of Citi (C), Charles Schwab (SCHW), Barclays (LON:BARC), Citadel Securities, Credit Suisse (CS), BNY Mellon (BK), and software provider R3.

The software provider R3 provided Project Ion with Corda distributed ledger technology (DLT) software.