The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) has partnered with Blockchain Technology Partners (BTP) to put the finishing touches on its distributed ledger technology (DLT) securities lending project ahead of the platform’s launch later this year.
According to TASE, the Blockchain Securities Lending (BSL) aims to address the fragmented, inefficient and opaque nature of the securities lending market in Israel.
BSL will enable direct lending among all the major financial participants and offer a one-stop shop for all securities lending activities, the exchange says. It aims to facilitate access to larger securities volumes within shorter timeframes and operate in shorter-term positions.
Uri Shavit, chief information officer for TASE, says BSL will provide a distributed service available to all Isreali market participants in order to increase market volumes and make securities lending available for more players.
The DLT platform is being built in collaboration with Accenture, Intel and global fintech innovation centre The Floor, and was has been in development since early 2017.
BSL is built on Hyperledger Sawtooth, an open-source enterprise blockchain network. It utilises Intel Software Guard Extensions technology to maintain data privacy, which aims to ensure that the details of an individual transaction are only visible to its participants.
BTP was introduced to TASE by Intel and has now been brought onto the project to “ensure the production readiness” of the platform and provide ongoing support after its launch.
As part of its contribution, BTP will offer access to its management platform Sextant.
Sextant is comprised of production-grade Sawtooth distribution technology and other tools to deploy and manage this distribution on Kubernetes in production, says BTP.
Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO of BTP, explains that since joining the project his firm and been working with TASE on acceptance testing over the past few months.
“As a result of this collaboration both BSL and our distribution of Sawtooth have been significantly improved with changes to the latter being contributed upstream,” he says.
With the acceptance testing over, BTP and TASE are able to “move forward with a comprehensive production readiness programme that covers governance, operations, security, support and user acceptance testing in preparation for the launch of the BSL platform later this year”.
What is Hyperledger Sawtooth and why does it matter?
TASE’s choice of Sawtooth sets it apart from other exchanges’ DLT project including Deutsche Boerse’s partnership with HQLAᵡ, which is powered by R3’s Corda technology, and Spanish stock exchange BME’s offering built on Hyperledger Fabric.
Hyperledger Sawtooth is an open-source enterprise blockchain network that is hosted as part of the ‘Hyperledger Greenhouse’ but which is distinctly different from better known open source projects such as Fabric and Indy.
Johnston-Watt tells SLT that, besides being open source, industry agnostic and governed by the Hyperledger Foundation, the key point in favour of Hyperledger Sawtooth is its pluggable consensus mechanism.
It is also scalable and has a highly modular architecture that offers a clear separation between the network and the application tiers, he adds.
Additionally, Johnston-Watt says, Hyperledger Sawtooth offers "first-class support" for smart contracts, which is epitomised by its support for Digital Assets' open-source DAML smart contract technology, which was integrated with Sawtooth in May 2019.
