Distributed Ledgers can scale: Two independent studies confirm


Two independent studies published today have confirmed that the Digital Asset Platform is more than capable of handling the trade volumes processed by major equity markets.

DTCC Announces Study Results Demonstrating that DLT Can Support Trading Volumes in the US Equity Markets

The study, which was conducted by Accenture with additional support provided by technology service providers Digital Asset (DA) and R3, proved that DLT can perform at levels necessary to process an entire trading day’s volume at peak rates, which equates to 115,000,000 daily trades, or 6,300 trades per second for five continuous hours. Currently, public blockchains supporting crypto-currencies operate at single or double digit per second performance, which until now was the only indication of the potential volume that a private DLT might be able to support.

“This project answered key questions and built serious confidence in blockchain’s ability to drive large scale transformation,” said David Treat, Managing Director, Global Blockchain Lead, Accenture. “The close collaboration with the DTCC and our alliance partners, Digital Asset and R3, enables us to push DLT performance to new levels against real world requirements and conditions.”

Read the DTCC Press Release

In the second study released today, global provider of business, IT and software services to the financial services community, GFT, independently confirmed that the DA Platform was able to exceed peak equity trading volumes for a sustained period. In their rigorous performance tests, GFT showed that DA’s DLT platform was able to process trading volumes in excess of 27,000 trades per second.

GFT Tests Performance of Digital Asset Platform, Exceeding Peak Equity Trade Volumes

GFT’s leading DLT specialists conducted the performance review with the assistance of engineers from DA. To ensure objectivity, DA provided GFT with access to the DA Platform’s code base and a production-like environment to simulate a typical trade day for a cash equities market and a real-time market simulation based on historical data. A series of test scripts were then run to verify the throughput was capable of supporting 27,000 trades per second, which equates to approximately 81,000 DLT transaction updates per second.

Read the GFT Press Release

 

It’s important to note that both of these tests focused on measuring trades per second, which allows for a more direct understanding of DLT’s usefulness in equities markets. Most DLT performance studies to date focus on measuring ledger updates, a far simpler operation. For more information on the difference between trades per second and transactions per second:

Read the GFT Case Study