The London Stock Exchange has an ambitious new idea: blockchain technology.

What’s happening:

• The London Stock Exchange Group has announced formal plans to use blockchain technology to enable more seamless transactions of traditional financial assets
• The aim is to become the first stock exchange to provide an end to end blockchain based settlement layer for users
• The London Stock Exchange group plans to strictly use blockchain as an underlying technology and is not building any crypto based assets

Why it matters:

• The London Stock Exchange Group is one of the most prestigious companies in the financial world, alongside of NYSE and NASDAQ
• Regulated public markets and blockchain technology have seemed at odds with each other for a long time, so this new move could usher in a wave of adoption and innovation
• Leveraging blockchain technology could make public markets more borderless and enable rapid transactions on aa global scale
• There are numerous startups working to tokenize public equities but this is the first move from a major stock exchange to adopt blockchain technology

Going deeper:

• Bringing the blockchain into the fold is not going to immediately integrate with the London Stock Exchange and is being built as a separate digital venture for now
• The concept is to be able to have the new blockchain settlement technology fully regulated in the same way traditional stock exchanges are
• One of the first use cases the London Stock Exchange Group is considering is enabling transactions between buyers and sellers in the private markets, as there is less volume and activity
  

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