The Swift Institute has announced a €15,000 reward for the researcher who brings the best proposal on the blockchain technology’s use in securities markets.
The announcement came in a document, titled “Call for Proposals”, where the institute asked researchers to provide their thesis on blockchain’s practical applicability in enterprise-level financial needs. It first recognized the technology for being popular enough to be experimented by financial institutions like Nasdaq, UBS and NYSE; but overall remained suspicious on its ability to handle higher transactions at a particular point of time.
“Presumably to cater for the daily volume of securities transactions globally, high-end servers (super computers) would need to be in place,” Swift stated. “Would this effectively centralize the distributed ledger? What type of infrastructure would be required to run all or a subset of securities transactions on Blockchain?”
The document further asked researchers to study that how a security transaction lifecycle, that currently involves many actors before reaching conclusive settlement, would look like on the blockchain compared to today. It asked whether it, in its original form, is credible enough to remove all sorts of intermediaries from the security transaction, or require some extra engineering to achieve the desired results. It further questioned blockchain’s credibility in saving operational costs, considering it requires a “significant amount of computing power to maintain the Bitcoin ledger, albeit in a distributed environment.”
It then quoted:
“A grant of EUR 15,000 will be awarded to the author of the selected proposal. 50% will be paid immediately; the remaining 50% will be paid on acceptance of a working paper. The SWIFT Institute will publish the working paper to the global financial industry whilst the author is free to submit the paper for publication in academic journals and other publication outlets of their choice.”
The finance technology incubator is backed by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a cooperative organization that provides a secure and standardized infrastructure to send and receive information about financial transactions.
For more information, read the full document here.