JP Morgan Tests Blockchain’s Capital Markets Potential

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is experimenting with the way blockchain could help cut costs and facilitate smoother transactions within capital markets, where securities are bought and sold. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, the bank demonstrated a prototype of its blockchain-based platform for capital markets, called Dromaius, at the Consensus 2018 conference. A team of employees will work this year on overcoming challenges related to integrating and scaling the technology before deploying it to customers, said Christine Moy, executive director and head of J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence. “We think the technology has the potential to be transformative,” she said.  A blockchain ledger allows participants to add blocks of information after each party runs algorithms to evaluate a proposed transaction. If the parties agree that the transaction looks valid — identifying information matches the blockchain’s history and follows the rules created by the participants — then it will be approved, time-stamped and added to the chain. The data, encrypted and unchangeable, is always up-to-date on all participants’ systems.