ASX says its DLT-as-a-Service platform is now production-ready

Exchange says 20 firms already exploring Synfini which uses the same technology as ASX’s flagship CHESS replacement but is offered as a cloud service.

The Australian Securities Exchange’s (ASX) new distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a Service platform is now production-ready, meaning market participants can use the same underlying technology used on its CHESS replacement to bring solutions to market quicker.

The service – Synfini – uses the same technology as ASX’s flagship CHESS replacement, but is offered as a cloud service, allowing flexibility and scalability to ASX’s customers as their usage grows. It provides customers with access to ASX’s DLT infrastructure, data hosting, ledger services and support.

ASX said the DLT as a service ‘sandpit’ opened in January this year, with more than 20 firms ‘jumping in’ to explore the Daml smart contract language from Digital Asset for building multi-party applications.

Broadridge is one of the first adopters and is developing an application that automates and eliminates paper for off-market transfers in the equities market.

“It extracts and simplifies business processes to make data accessible and optimises workflows using smart contracts,” said Paul Stonham, general manager business development, ASX DLT Solutions.

“This eliminates the need for organisations to build, run and support their own environment, reducing cost, complexity and risk.”

ASX said each party has invite-only and permissioned access to a synchronised and real-time immutable audit trail, which improves the accuracy of information and workflows, thereby reducing delays and the need for additional manual reconciliation.

Automated consent management and sovereignty to data owners ensures each party sees only the data on the ledger that they have permission to access. The platform’s committer nodes sit across several data centres and leverage Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) technology, ensuring reliability and integrity for all parties in each workflow.

“It’s great to see customers, like the ASX, using our technology to build additional solutions beyond the original use case,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO at Digital Asset. “Synfini is a great opportunity for users to familiarise themselves with Daml, while getting new products and services to market faster in a DLT environment.”

The move of CHESS – ASX’s equities clearing and settlement system – to a DLT platform through the help of Digital Asset has been planned since 2016 and is still on-track for go-live in April 2023, its chairman said in a recent AGM address.

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