Australian Securities Exchange blockchain delayed again • The Register

One of the world’s most prominent and mission-critical uses of blockchain – the Australian Securities Exchange’s (ASX) project to replace the CHESS core trading system with a distributed ledger – has run into further problems.

As The register has previously noted that the project began in 2017, but that the start date was pushed back from 2021 to April 2023, before the ASX warned that the deadline was likely to be missed.

Yesterday, the exchange revealed “we do not expect the start date of new CHESS to be before the end of 2024.”

A statement [PDF] attributed the delay to analysis that revealed “more development is required than previously thought to meet ASX’s scalability and resiliency requirements for the application. This is contributing to delays in the delivery of the remaining technical components of the application.”

The ASX has been working with an outfit called Digital Asset – a provider of the DAML smart contract language – on the project.

The statement reveals that Digital Asset’s work will be independently reviewed by Accenture, and “The review will also identify necessary actions for ASX to communicate a revised timetable for completing the project.”

An update [PDF] sent to ASX stakeholders indicates that the organisation’s management believes “a fresh set of eyes” is needed to reassess the project.

That view comes from Helen Lofthouse, who started working as managing director and managing director at the ASX on August 1.

The stakeholder letter also reveals that project testing planned for September 2022 has been postponed.

The register understand that the current version of CHESS is a COBOL application running on hardware powered by Intel’s defunct Itanium architecture.

The planned version of CHESS uses VMware Blockchain – an option The register understand was created because it is a nice distributed ledger and because the company’s expertise in packaging and publishing applications made it ideal for the application’s architecture with market participants running their own CHESS nodes. The register understand that Virtzilla’s items are not the source of the CHESS replacement’s problems.

The ASX’s 2017 decision to adopt blockchain was seen as a bold bet on the technology, and one that proponents hoped could provide a proof-of-concept that distributed ledgers could perform at scale in a very sensitive role.

With no start date in sight, and the project apparently in significant trouble, it may have become a cautionary tale. ®