SETL blockchain powers Cobalt’s FX post trade
Special FX
London-based blockchain firm SETL and Cobalt DL, a private peer-to-peer network, have teamed up to use SETL’s OpenCSD within the Cobalt FX post trade platform.
The service is set to launch in 2017, with 15 institutional FX participants “already committed” to the service. Earlier this year, SETL unveiled the OpenCSD platform, its first commercial offering, enabling any market participant to commission and run a permissioned registry service for payments, settlement and clearing of cash and other “financial instruments”.
Andy Coyne, co-founder of Cobalt DL, says it did an “exhaustive review of the technology in the DL [distributed ledger] space” and chose SETL due to its “technical leadership in the field, their ability to process trades at scale and their team’s deep understanding of financial services”.
SETL says by creating a shared view of trade data, Cobalt DL frees up back and middle office resources from multiple layers of reconciliation.
Cobalt DL will create a single, shared view of each FX transaction using OpenCSD. The immutable record will “obviate disagreements and reconciliation problems between participants and is expected to result in significantly reduced costs”.
In addition, SETL says OpenCSD has the capacity to process many billions of transactions per day. The record will provide cryptographic proof of a contract and of the parties’ agreement to the trade terms. Participants will be able to retrieve details of their own trading activity from the ledger in a manner which “absolutely verifies their inclusion in the shared record, but does not allow them to examine other participants’ activities”.
