Russia's Central Depository Trials Hyperledger for Bond Trading

The National Settlement Depository (NSD), the central depository for Russia's largest securities exchange group, has announced it is testing a new commercial bond trading platform built on top of the Hyperledger blockchain consortium's Fabric software.

Already, Raiffeisenbank Russia has used the prototype platform to purchase $10 million-worth of bonds of MegaFon, the country's second-largest mobile phone network. The bonds have a redemption date of December 22 and, despite the short-lived nature of the test, the NSD concluded that the technology could help keep the process "simple and transparent."

"The ultimate goal [of the] NSD is to build blockchain infrastructure for any innovative financial product to operate on. Once the infrastructure is created, [the] technology holds potential to deliver a large variety of financial products and services operated by smart contracts," Eddie Astanin, chairman of the NSD's executive board, said in a statement.

Notably, the central depository operator has made the code behind the project open source on GitHub. California-based software firm Altoros also took part in developing the prototype platform.

The project adds to the slate of initiatives already underway at the NSD, including a cryptocurrency wallet as part of a broader suite of services.

"Our goal is to create a secure and user-friendly accounting infrastructure for digital assets," Astanin said in a statement at the time.

The Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger consortium takes a focus on building blockchains for enterprises, and has so far signed up more than 130 members. Notably, it issued the Fabric software's official release candidate in June, framing it as an important step towards a finalized version 1.0 launch.

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