Several organizations showed off blockchain prototypes at a Sibos event in Geneva recently. There was plenty of discussion regarding the technology. Russia’s National Settlement Depository(NSD) and South Africa’s Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) came away from the event having signed a letter of intent to begin initiatives using distributed ledger protocols.

The intention of the collaboration is to spur developments using distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Both Russia and South Africa will focus on the proxy voting use case. There is a common believe that the partnership will support DLT technologies and innovations, and bring about solutions that will “benefit the financial market”.

The two parties are hopeful that the result will be rapid blockchain growth, and a “paradigm shift” in the current market. They expect major changes to securities transactions, the financial infrastructure, and more.

The NSD was a front-runner in developing a blockchain-based prototype for an e-proxy voting network back in April. The project, based on the NXT distributed cryptographic platform and the international standard 20022 for messaging purposes, was designed for corporate actions, issuing documents and data, and securties transactions. The code is entirely open source and is available at GitHub.

This new partnership between CSD and NSDs has potential to bring a mutual collaboration for blockchain-based post-trade settlement. Down the line, expect to see DLT standards established, along with infrastructure benefits and savings in business costs. The partners are open to discussing adding other groups to the partnership, and it seems many have expressed such interest.

In other areas, DLT continues to produce new collaborations. Many groups are moving toward new partnerships in order to advance new technology at a more rapid pace. Many also intend to apply common standards. With these new collabs being born with such frequency, DLT can not help but to grow and develop, especially with NSD offering its expertise to others in the industry.