AST Financial and NuArca have completed a successful scaled-up pilot of their blockchain-based proxy voting solution, ahead of its planned launch in March 2018.
The pilot tested the solution’s ability to efficiently and economically support the transaction volumes and speeds required for large-scale proxy campaigns, while also validating and storing ledgers of vote transactions.
The test spanned more than 400 securities and 8 million shareholders, representing more than 1 trillion shares, and the solution reached processing speeds of more than 100 transactions per second.
Once live, the network is intended to simplify the proxy voting process for issuers, brokers, intermediaries and custodians, while also reducing the costs involved. It will also also allow for better transparency and easier access to information, plus additional analytics.
Based on the Hyperledger Fabric distributed ledger technology (DLT), it will be deployed as a cloud service.
AST has hailed the pilot as a significant milestone in its rollout of DLT-enabled solutions, through its ongoing strategic partnership with NuArca.
Todd Cooper, managing director and co-founder of NuArca, said: “A key concern with blockchain or DLT solutions in financial services in the past has been their ability to scale enough to cope with the volumes that an everyday financial solution needs to handle.”
He added: “By successfully completing this pilot, we have shown that our proxy voting system will be able to meet the needs of even the largest campaigns without compromising on transparency or reliability.”
Sue Lawrence, chief marketing and strategy officer of AST, said: “We recognised the applicability of blockchain to the complex proxy voting infrastructure and saw an opportunity to revolutionise the industry with this service.”
“Our objective is to create a process that promotes efficiency, accuracy and data security in every campaign by establishing direct connectivity across parties.”
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