The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has been building the world's first, actual industrial-scale blockchain use case[1] -- a new post-trade solution to replace its legacy Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) platform, which has been running for around 25 years.
"When it was implemented in 1995 it was world-leading and some would say, is still world-leading in its functionality today," deputy CEO Peter Hiom said. "That said, it's also one of those 25-year-old systems that in some point in time you run out of COBOL programmers who know how that system works."
See also: Here's what to expect from ASX's blockchain-based CHESS replacement[2]
After a few setbacks[3] due to market readiness and the COVID-19 pandemic, go-live for the CHESS replacement is now scheduled for April 2023[4].
Discussing the project at the Future of Financial Services 2020 virtual conference on Thursday, Hiom said given how new distributed ledger technology (DLT) is, any project based on the tech needs a lot of testing and a lot of rigour around implementation.
"We've spent a lot of time reassuring people as to what it isn't as opposed to what it is -- this is not such a radical change, it's a database technology -- we're not flying to Mars here. We may be being innovative but there are lots of things about the technology that we're using that are not new," he said.
The exchange kicked off the process to find a suitable replacement for CHESS around five years ago[5]. Hiom said this coincided with what he called "peak blockchain", which was when interest in the tech was starting to spur.
But Hiom is hesitant to call it a blockchain system.
"I would call it DLT as opposed to blockchain