Michaele James, EVP Engineering, 9th Gear Technologies
1. What is 9th Gear and what problem do you solve?
9th Gear is the only institutional foreign exchange (FX) marketplace with on-demand payment liquidity, enabling same day trading and settlement. We offer greater transparency, reduced risk and lower cost to significantly more participants. Through a digital transformation of the backend, 9th Gear has re-imagined the FX transaction, moving from today’s simple messaging platform-based process where a handful of global banks dominate the industry and trades take two days to settle, to a process that is open to brand new participants and can be completed in minutes. 9th Gear leverages the smart contracts and distributed ledger of a private permissioned blockchain to transform this $5.1 trillion daily industry.
2. Why do you use blockchain technology to solve this problem?
We use blockchain because it offers two key benefits:
a. Blockchain provides an immutable distributed ledger: This record, along with the immediate settlement of payment, eliminates the tedious process of comparing trade details recorded in each counterparty’s FX system. The distributed ledger brings transparency and a single version of the truth for the trade detail.
b. Blockchain enables high speed payment rails to complete immediate settlement between counterparties as opposed to moving funds through a complex network of correspondent banks. This efficient method eliminates cost, payment delays, errors and, of course, is much faster as payments move in seconds as opposed to hours.
3. Can you tell us a little about the blockchain technology that you use?
We are using the Quorum blockchain framework, developed by JPMorgan, which is a derivative of the open-source Ethereum platform. This framework offers us the ability to:
– establish a private, permissioned blockchain implementation, insuring greater levels of privacy,
– seamlessly increase the numbers of blockchain nodes when needed to support the addition of banks & institutions and
– provide an immutable ledger of all transactions, ensuring a single, agreed-upon ordering of transactions in the blockchain and establishing a Proof-of-Authority using a consensus model
4. How do you interact with the wider developer community?
Our developers are both members of as well as influencers and ambassadors in the Quorum development community. We regularly participate in the community forums, meet-ups and have assisted with stamping out bugs in the source code.
We have been active in the Quorum communities and have been regularly communicating & enhancing the open source Quorum framework as we find them.
5. How old is 9th Gear?
9th Gear was founded just over a year ago, in January 2018. Yesterday, almost 30 people strong, we launched out of stealth mode.
6. After FX, do you have plans for other markets?
After the huge ($5.1 T daily) FX market, 9th Gear intends to leverage this concept to additional markets including FX swaps and forwards, and various types of securities transactions where 9th Gear has the potential to also transform the securities lending industry with on-demand securities liquidity.