The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) announced today that it has teamed up with distributed ledger technology (DLT) specialist Digital Asset (DA) and VMware.
The exchange has signed a three-party memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together with the other two companies on DLT initiatives in Australia and New Zealand. This will include the development of the application to replace CHESS (ASX’s equities clearing and settlement system), the support of DAML (the open source smart contract programming language used to build distributed applications), and the provision and support of the distributed ledger and associated infrastructure, which delivers ASX’s data privacy, confidentiality and security requirements at greater scale.
Peter Hiom, ASX Deputy CEO, explained:
This new partnership is a very positive development that will help us support a wider range of DLT solutions developed by the industry. It confirms our belief in the potential of DLT as we remain on track to deliver the CHESS replacement system in March-April 2021.
Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, said:
We continue to achieve our milestones to deliver a production-grade, scalable distributed ledger solution for CHESS. VMware is now part of the mission we share with ASX to deliver a DAML-based distributed infrastructure to realise the full potential of this technology.
Providing a state-of-the-art DLT-based system will create new business opportunities for the industry,” commented David Tennenhouse, Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer at VMware. We’re working closely with DA and ASX on a combined offering to provide the enterprise-grade foundation for ASX, and we look forward to expanding our relationship.
DA is the creator of DAML and ASX’s CHESS replacement technology partner. VMware is a New York Stock Exchange-listed server virtualisation and cloud computing software provider. It is also an existing supplier of virtualisation and infrastructure solutions to ASX.