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Announced on November 6, 2018, the addition of Barclays brings to 15 the number of dealers in the main blockchain project of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). By recoding the DTCC’s Trade Information Warehouse (TIW) for bilateral credit derivatives in only 18 months, the securities depository and its team of IT consultants – IBM, Axoni and R3 – hope to show that distributed ledger technology and cloud platforms are feasible options for high volume transaction processing and recordkeeping systems — initially for those services with similar data architectures on a permissioned platform.

On October 16, 2018, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) reported that “distributed ledger technology (DLT) is capable of supporting average daily trading volumes in the US equity market of more than 100 million trades per day.” Based on a cooperative study by Accenture, Digital Asset and R3, the clearing and settlement service provider said that DLT can process daily trading volume at peak rates of 6,300 trades per second for five continuous hours. Past benchmarks were based on cryptocurrency blockchains that now operate at fewer than 100 trades per second.

The Bank of England’s Securities Lending Committee took up the question of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in its September 24 meeting. Three vendors were invited to present their concepts to the group of nearly two dozen UK bankers and their regulators. The presentations and the Committee members’ reactions were summarized in the minutes of the meeting. Each vendor approached the market from a different perspective, using a different aspect of DLT. Members found some value in the proposed solutions, yet were generally disappointed in the market impact of the innovative approaches.

More than 1,200 dealmakers brought their ardor and business plans to sold-out Polycon18, a giant-sized version of television’s Shark Tank which convened at the Bahamas’ Bal Mar Grand Hyatt Hotel from February 28th to March 3rd, 2018. Attending investors were shown project offerings, as well as conference materials that cited U.S. Senate testimony by SEC chair, Jay Clayton, to the effect that initial coin offerings (ICOs) of securities tokens would indeed be considered securities:

“When investors are offered and sold securities – which to date ICOs have largely been – they are entitled to the benefits of state and federal securities laws and sellers and other market participants must follow these laws.”

On May 16, 2018, JPMorgan Chase unveiled Dromaius, its prototype of a shared ledger for capital market services, at Coindesk’s Consensus 2018 conference. The prototype is designed to test the use of the Ethereum blockchain technology in supporting a coordinated posting by multiple entities to a single encrypted securities bookkeeping system. JPMC executive director Christine Moy said that, “We think the technology has the potential to be transformative.”

Ms. Moy, who leads J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence, told the Wall Street Journal that the technology “should streamline operations, help with cost savings and overall make the experience of transacting or issuing a financial instrument like this more seamless and simplified.”