On October 16, 2018, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) reported that “distributed ledger technology (DLT) is capable of supporting average daily trading volumes in the US equity market of more than 100 million trades per day.” Based on a cooperative study by Accenture, Digital Asset and R3, the clearing and settlement service provider said that DLT can process daily trading volume at peak rates of 6,300 trades per second for five continuous hours. Past benchmarks were based on cryptocurrency blockchains that now operate at fewer than 100 trades per second.

DTCC commissioned the benchmark study to analyze DLT’s ability to cope with the trading volumes of the US equities market. With DTCC’s specifications, Accenture built a functional prototype of the trade settlement system on the DLT platforms of Digital Asset and R3 Corda.

“This project answered key questions and built serious confidence in blockchain’s ability to drive large scale transformation,” said David Treat, Managing Director, Global Blockchain Lead, Accenture. “The close collaboration with the DTCC and our alliance partners, Digital Asset and R3, enables us to push DLT performance to new levels against real world requirements and conditions.”

Accenture’s shared ledger model ran with 170 nodes over 19 weeks, simulating DTCC’s network of exchanges and market participants. After capturing trades from the exchange nodes, DTCC was positioned as the central counterparty to maintain privacy in the shared ledger. The simulated trades were then netted and settled, using a test environment created in the cloud.

More information about the DTCC study is available here.