The core focus of the group is to identify, analyse and define use cases and integration points for digital currency and distributed ledger technologies, and recommend best practices for FIX implementation and usage of this emerging technology in financial markets.

Sean Ristau, head of wealth management & derivatives at Raptor Trading Systems, Ron Quaranta, CEO of Digital Currency Labs LLC. and Ryan Pierce, director and technology architect, engineering and execution at CME Group will chair the group.

Ristau says many FIX Trading Community members already have internal groups focusing on this topic: “As digital currency and blockchain technology initiatives around the globe continue to grow, members are looking to the FIX Trading Community group for guidance. The formation of this Working Group is an important step in this process."

Digital currency exchange Coinbase, which is backed by he New York Stock Exchange, USAA and BBVA among others, earlier this year added support for the FIX protocol for order management by professional traders.

The creation of the Working Group comes as financial institutions the world over step up their involvement in blockchain-based technology initiatives. Evidence of the growing interest in the emerging technology was on display at the Sibos conference in Singapore, where a session on blockchain developments organised by Innotribe, the innovation arm of interbank messaging network Swift, drew a standing room-only crowd to hear the likes of DBS and Barclays Bank preach on the disruptive potential of the technology. In a public vote, one-in-three of the delegates squeezed into room felt their bank should be seriously investing in blockchain-based initiatives.

Separately, SETL, the institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology set up earlier this year by former Ch-X chief Peter Randall, has announced that it has established a test network which has broken the 1 billion transactions-per-day capacity barrier for blockchain movements. The company says it is in discussion with more than 40 financial institutions including leading banks and infrastructure providers to create a cross-industry platform.

Says Randall: “Our processing capacity now exceeds the volume of every electronic payment made globally on a live-time gross basis. In collaboration with our partners, we know that we have a significant project ahead of us; today is a milestone in this process of bringing a scalable blockchain solution to the world of payments and settlement.”