One of the world’s most prominent blockchain apps looks to be shelved • The Register

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has signaled it will abandon plans to rebuild its core platforms on blockchain technology.

In 2017, the ASX decided to replace its core app, called CHESS, with a system based on blockchain and the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML). The exchange hoped to allow market participants to run their own nodes of a blockchain that would record their transactions, before curling out across the blockchain so that all other stakeholders would also have an overview of the transaction. This was billed as a modern way of running an exchange, rather than an old-fashioned central platform.

The plan attracted enormous attention, and praise, from the blockchain community, which saw it as an endorsement of the technology’s suitability for the extremely demanding and sensitive job of running a major stock exchange — and therefore for almost everything else.

But the project did not go well. In 2020 it was pushed back a year, then further delays led to a plan to go live in 2023.

In late 2022, the ASX put the project on hold after a review found that using blockchain technology was not up to the job. An external review found poor supplier management and technology problems combined to derail the project.

As the ASX is a listed entity – on its own exchange! – All this unfolded in public in the form of continuous disclosure of the project’s problems.

In November 2022, shortly after the project was paused, it was the subject of an extraordinary blog post by former Amazon Web Services veep and renowned engineer Tim Bray, who shared his experience of being asked by then-AWS CEO Andy Jassy to visit New York finance. services industry to help the cloud giant develop a blockchain strategy.

Bray’s post describes how, in several meetings on the journey, he could find little practical need or application for blockchain – but kept hearing that as the ASX adopted the technology, it needed to be taken seriously.

AWS chose not to make a big blockchain play.

A year later, Bray wrote, Jassy again asked for a discussion about AWS’s blockchain strategy, which was necessary in part because the ASX was adopting the technology.

AWS stayed out, again, content to sell cloud services to other blockchain users.

Last week, the ASX hosted a webinar to update stakeholders on the status of the CHESS project.

In that session, ASX executives presented four options: fix the blockchain-based project; build a brand new app; purchase a commercial product; or redo the current code base.

In a Q&A session at the end of the webinar, executives were asked if blockchain was likely to be used in any of these options.

“Do you expect the new solution to go down a more conventional route, ie without a focus on DLT blockchain etc?”

Tim Whitely, ASX transformation project director, responded: “While we continue to explore all options, we need to use a more conventional technology than in the original solution to achieve the business outcomes.”

Which sounds very much like the ASX is going to binge blockchain.

And in doing so, rob the world of one of the most visible and demanding applications for which it was ever deemed fit. ®