Blockchain is an emerging digital technology that has the potential to enable securities trading organizations to significantly reduce the cost, complexity and speed of trading and settlement processes.

IBM will work with JPX to jointly evaluate how the IBM open source blockchain code, that has been proposed to the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project, could be used for trading and settlement in low liquidity markets. As the Hyperledger Project evolves, the joint IBM and JPX evaluation work will transition to use of the code produced by that effort.

"Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies that is being closely watched by financial communities throughout the world," said Atsushi Santo, Head of New Business Development, Japan Exchange Group.

"We plan to explore blockchain fabric to evaluate technical limitations and the potential of blockchain for post-trading service for low volume traffic by fully utilizing IBM global resources including IBM Research, Tokyo."

Guided by IBM Global Business Services consulting expertise in the application of blockchain to financial markets, the verification tests will adopt a framework based on the open source blockchain fabric.

IBM has more than 20 years of leadership in the open source movement, and thousands of developers certified to engage in open source development. Currently, IBM participates in and contributes to more than 150 open source projects.

These projects include Spark, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Open Contain Project, Node.js, CouchDb, Linux, Eclipse and an already established relationship with Apache. IBM has offered its IBM Blockchain code to the Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project.