R3 has collaborated with Intel and eight R3 consortium member banks to successfully test a distributed ledger prototype for bond transactions.

The trial used US treasury bonds to demonstrate how blockchain technology can support trading in real-world financial markets, delivering the necessary scalability to support more than 100,000 transactions per day.

The trial was carried out in R3’s Lab and Research Centre, where participants used physical, non-cloud-based nodes hosted globally to interact and simulate US treasury trading on the ledger.

The platform featured smart contract functionality, enabling trading, matching and settlement of US treasury bonds on-chain, as well as automated coupon payments and redemption based on network time and third party data sources. The trial also incorporated an on-chain identity registry to facilitate the permissioning of validators and transactors.

Tim Grant, CEO of R3’s Lab and Research Centre, commented: “Our goal at R3 is to bring our members together with the strongest technology players and work collaboratively to evaluate and accelerate this ground-breaking technology to production using real-world use cases. We are delighted to build on our strong relationship with Intel to demonstrate how distributed and shared ledgers can deliver material efficiencies throughout the full trading lifecycle of an asset.”

Jerry Bautista, vice president of the New Business Group at Intel, added: “We believe collaborative exploration of blockchain usages is key to the development of this emerging technology. We are excited to show how Intel technologies such as Software Guard Extensions can improve the security and scalability of blockchain deployments.”

R3 consortium members involved in this project included CIBC, ING Bank, HSBC, Scotiabank, Societe Generale, State Street, UBS and UniCredit.

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