Financial innovation company R3 and eight of its largest consortium member banks, including HSBC, Societe Generale and State Street, have successfully tested Intel’s distributed ledger prototype for bond transactions.
The trial used US treasury bonds to demonstrate how distributed ledger technology can support trading in real-world financial markets, delivering the necessary scalability and supporting throughput of over 100,000 transactions per day.
Intel will be donating the bond-related transaction families (software code written to simulate the behaviour of bonds on an exchange) to the Hyperledger Project and will be running live demos of the platform at the Hyperledger booth (C90) at Sibos this week.
R3 and Intel are premier members of the Hyperledger effort, and State Street is a general member.
CIBC, ING Bank, Scotiabank, UBS and UniCredit were also involved in the trial.
R3 and its consortium members built and used an implementation of Sawtooth Lake, Intel’s proprietary distributed ledger platform, along with Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a technology that enables developers to protect select code and data from disclosure or modification.
The trial involved physical, non-cloud-based nodes hosted globally across the US, Canada, Asia, Australia and Europe to interact and simulate US treasury trading on the ledger.
Jerry Bautista, vice president of the new business group at Intel, said: “We believe collaborative exploration of blockchain usages is key to the development of this emerging technology. We are excited to show how Intel technologies such as SGX can improve the security and scalability of blockchain deployments.”
Tim Grant, CEO of R3’s lab and research centre, added: “Our goal at R3 is to bring our members together with the strongest technology players and work collaboratively to evaluate and accelerate this groundbreaking technology to production using real-world use cases.”
“We are delighted to build on our strong relationship with Intel to demonstrate how distributed and shared ledgers can deliver material efficiencies throughout the full trading lifecycle of an asset.”
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