SETL, the institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, has today announced that it has established a test network which has broken the 1 billion transactions-per-day capacity barrier for blockchain movements.

SETL announced its plans to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology in July 2015 and is currently in discussion with more than 40 financial institutions including leading banks and infrastructure providers to create a cross-industry solution. The SETL system is designed with financial markets users in mind and will enable market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of transactions. The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

According to the CapGemini/RBS World Payments Report 2015, total non-cash payments globally, including all wholesale and retail electronic payments, amount to 389bn per year, equivalent to 1.06bn movements per day. The top 10 payments markets including North America, the Eurozone, UK, Brazil, China, Japan, Russia and Australia amount to approximately 300bn payments a year or 0.8bn a day. By exceeding 1 billion transactions per day, SETL is addressing one of the fundamental issues of legacy blockchains, which, unlike SETL, are not designed for financial markets and are unable to handle market volumes.

Peter Randall, COO of SETL, said: “We are very excited to break through the 1 billion transactions per day barrier and to be the first to demonstrate that the SETL blockchain can handle the volumes required by the financial services industry, where speed, capacity and reliability are crucial. Our processing capacity now exceeds the volume of every electronic payment made globally on a live-time gross basis. In collaboration with our partners, we know that we have a significant project ahead of us; today is a milestone in this process of bringing a scalable blockchain solution to the world of payments and settlement. 

The network deployed by SETL is running across a set of nodes in the UK and Europe and comprises a number of interlinked and communicating blockchains. Assets deployed on one chain can be transmitted to others via a ‘witness node’ which has a presence on the sending and receiving chains. 

Anthony Culligan, CEO of SETL, added: “Markets are often segregated by function, jurisdiction and purpose. In addition to the significant performance gains,  our development of the witness node technology allows us to create closed groups of participants who have a shared purpose, enabling them to move assets to and from the wider financial world.”