Banks test blockchain potential for real-time market surveillance

Regulators can monitor a million active trades and hundreds of messages per second in swap test

Linked in: an external signal could automate functions on the smart contracts

A group of banks and tech firms has tested the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts for the affirmation and post-trade lifecycle management of equity swaps, in concert with a node on the network acting as a regulator to test the technology's potential to allow for real-time market surveillance.

The test – on over-the-counter single name, total return, index and portfolio equity swaps – was conducted by a group of five banks and organised by distributed ledger technology (DLT) firm