SETL today announced that it has successfully established a test network and has broken the 1 billion transactions-per-day capacity barrier for blockchain movements.
For a company that calls itself an initiative to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology, this indeed is big news.
In the press release issued to the media, SETL also revealed that it has successfully also developed novel techniques, which allow it to process transactions in a parallel and effectively remove practical constraints on volume.
Anthony Culligan, the SETL CEO, asserted that the company was in every way ready and determined to stay on the front.
Further, Culligan stressed that, “we are not running on a third party platform or powered by an off-the-shelf technology. We develop at the source code level to give us absolute control over how we can deliver our service. Less than 0.5% of our current codebase is licenced technology. This announcement demonstrates the benefits of the approach.”
The news is certainly going to boost morale of the team of SETL as it comes close on the heels of a previous news story which had reported that Peter Randall and former hedge fund manager Anthony Culligan jointly set this firm to provide the new settlement infrastructure. At that time, they had also claimed that the founder of European trading venue Chi-X Peter Randall has developed an accelerated version of the Bitcoin blockchain. They further had said that their blockchain was able to support 5,000 transactions per second and that it could also reach 100,000 transactions per second.
The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.
Peter Randall, COO of SETL, said that “we are very excited to break through the 1 billion transactions per day barrier and to be the first to demonstrate that the SETL blockchain can handle the volumes required by the financial services industry, where speed, capacity and reliability are crucial.”
As per the CapGemini/RBS World Payments Report 2015, total non-cash payments globally, including all wholesale and retail electronic payments, amount to 389bn per year, equivalent to 1.06bn movements per day.
SETL believes that by exceeding 1 billion transactions per day, it is addressing one of the fundamental issues of legacy blockchain, which, unlike SETL, are not designed for financial markets and are unable to handle market volumes.