The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a New York-based post-trade services provider, says Project Ion, an alternative settlement platform leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), has gone live in a parallel production environment.

The platform is now parallel-processing an average of over 100,000 bilateral equity transactions per day, and almost 160,000 transactions on peak days, with the settlement systems of DTCC subsidiary The Depository Trust Company remaining the authoritative record.

The DLT platform was developed in collaboration with many of the world’s leading financial market players and technology firms, including Apex Clearing, Barclays, BNY Mellon, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Citi, Credit Suisse Securities USA, Fidelity Investments, Fnality International, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Raymond James Financial, Robinhood Securities, State Street, and Virtu Financial.

Project Ion’s goal is to provide a resilient, secure and scalable alternative settlement service to clients, with the option to leverage DLT for firms that wish to take advantage of the emerging technology. DTCC partnered with leading enterprise technology provider R3 to develop and launch the platform leveraging R3’s Corda DLT software.

Murray Pozmanter, managing director, president of DTCC clearing agency services and head of global business operations, says: “Project Ion is an important step forward in advancing digitalization in financial markets and opens the door to exciting, new opportunities to drive greater efficiencies, risk management and cost savings for the industry. Digitized assets and emerging technology like DLT are shaping and evolving the financial services landscape, and we remain committed to advancing innovative solutions that capitalize on opportunities, deliver new value and drive the industry forward.”

According to DTCC, Project Ion adheres to the firm’s rigorous regulatory standards and deliver resiliency, volume capacity, security, scalability and risk controls. The platform also aims to support a netted T+0 settlement cycle, as well as T+2, T+1 and extended settlement cycles.

With the production parallel now live, DTCC says it is working closely with its clients on a phased expansion of the platform in line with the needs of the industry.

Meanwhile, Iyo Bank has become Japan’s first regional bank to adopt DTCC’s institutional trade processing services, which offer no-touch post-trade processing for equities and fixed-income transactions.

Through the adoption of several automated post-trade offerings, Iyo Bank is now able to spend less time and effort on manual processes while enabling transactions to achieve a shorter time to settlement, DTCC says.