Representatives of the CLS reported that their system is working successfully. “We have matched and confirmed the first transactions and successfully issued a netting report to the counterparties,” Ram Komarraju, managing director for technology at CLS, told CoinDesk.
The forex system CLS was founded in 2002 and has grown rapidly since then. In July 2012, it officially became the system utility of the financial market. By March 2017, CLS supported more than 50% of forex trading worldwide. The world's largest banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays became the participants of the system.
CLS began to investigate the technology of the distributed registry in 2015, when the blockchain just began to actively develop and implement massively. The first experiments in September 2016 appeared in the form of CLSNet. This is the network that has become a sandbox for trying to translate CLS processes to the blockchain. Together with IBM, the company worked to improve intraday liquidity, display real-time currency movements and reduce risks.
Investment banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the first companies to use the recently launched CLSNet, and six more participants from North America, Europe, and Asia, including Bank of China (Hong Kong), have pledged to join them in the near future. The developers' plans were to create an opportunity for participants to trade world currencies using various tools on the blockchain. The platform is based on Hyperledger Fabric technology.
From the start, CLS worked with IBM on blockchain solutions. However, in addition, in May 2018, CLS invested $ 5 million in R3. The organization entered the board of directors of the blockchain consortium. However, representatives of the project explained that the R3 platform will not be used for current services that CLS is working on. The company explained that investing in a consortium does not affect the future development of products using Hyperledger Fabric.
“With CLSNet now in production with two of the world’s largest banks, for a major market function, it is a testament to the ongoing maturity of blockchain technology and the value that it can deliver in practice,” said Marie Wieck, general manager at IBM Blockchain, in a press release.
Currently, CLSNet operates in more than 120 currencies and is designed to standardize and increase the level of the payment network in the foreign exchange market. Representatives of the project are confident that a standardized and automated process for calculating payments will lead to an improvement in intraday liquidity, a reduction in cost, an increase in work efficiency and, as a result of all the above, to support business growth.
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