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While it’s early in the roll-out of many blockchain use cases, there are immediate opportunities for the use of distributed ledger technology in the derivatives markets. Near the top of this list is the management and settlement of collateral, a multi-billion dollar headache for the world’s largest banks. The root cause: the frequent need to overly pre-fund margin requirements for the positions that banks hold at clearinghouses and at custody banks on behalf of themselves and their clients.

So, what’s new in distributed ledger technology (DLT)?

Just a few years ago DLT was being marketed as the second coming of financial technology and how it was going to change the world. And the mad dash of firms and syndicates, such as R3 and others, not to mention leading names like Blythe Masters were everywhere. Yet here the market is and DLT or blockchain has yet to become as common as quickly as Bluetooth technology.

Determining when a client is in distress is not always a straightforward process – banks and FX platforms need to have processes in place to ensure losses are not compounded.

Baton Systems wins this year’s best distributed-ledger technology (DLT) project after last year’s winner R3, thanks to its Baton Systems Platform. The company has two distributed ledger-based platforms: one that processes clearing of foreign-exchange (FX) transactions and another that settles margin collateral.

An under-the-radar effort to digitise the settlement of fiat currencies may be about to attract some real volume.

Nex Group and Baton Systems have built a real-time settlement system for foreign exchange trades, using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to cut the traditional two-day post-trade cycle down to as little as three minutes.

There’s a lot of chatter these days about the viability, perhaps even the legitimacy, of distributed ledgersystems for the financial markets. Lost in the “blockchain is dead” noise are some interesting cases that show just how DLT technologies can be used effectively in key pain points in the market.

Is distributed ledger technology (DLT) really going to be as revolutionary as many say?Or is it all about the hype? Baton Systems CEO and Founder Arjun Jayaram thinks the technology is real, viable and coming to a company near you.

The Bank of England said Tuesday that it is undertaking a new proof-of-concept to explore the ways its planned real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system could connect with distributed ledger networks.