Overstock, one of the leading e-commerce platforms has announced the plan to start trading its own stocks on its proprietary blockchain platform.
T0, as the platform is called, has been in development since over an year, and is expected to feature improved equity trading settlement services.
The announcement to start using T0 was made by the company’s communications director, Judd Bagley at the ongoing Money 2020 event in Las Vegas. Overstock’s decision comes weeks after the T0 platform started offering its services to Electronic Transaction Clearing, Inc. The California-based clearing and trading securities company has partnered with T0; to act as a custodian of shares for Overstock’s upcoming blockchain preferred share offering.
In the event, Bagley made it clear that the company’s decision to offer Overstock’s shares on the T0 platform is about more than just leveraging upon the advantages of distributed ledger technology. The move is also expected to influence other players to follow suit as the industry is not prepared to use blockchain technology as a mainstream solution, mostly due to fears of offending the conventional banking and financial institutions with whom they have a good working relationship.
He was quoted by a technology magazine saying,
“We’re from Utah. We don’t care. We’re really taking a ‘burn it down and start over’ approach.”
At the same time, he also clarified that T0 can’t be referred to as a stock exchange for various regulatory reasons, but as a trading widget for equities among many other things.
The discussion at Money 2020 saw many financial industry representatives agree to the importance of blockchain technology based solutions in trading and settlements. One of the main advantages of distributed ledger technology is the speed of operation, where trades can be settled in hours, if not minutes in comparison to the existing system that takes about 3 days.
Many global stock exchanges are already working on research, development, and implementation of blockchain technology into their operations. NASDAQ, Australian Securities Exchanges, DTCC, New York Stock Exchange are few such institutions pursuing the technology. We can expect more exchanges and institutions to do the same and influence mainstream adoption of distributed ledger technology in the near future.
Ref: VentureBeat | T0 Blog | Image: NewsBTC