The National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has developed and successfully tested an e-proxy voting system running on a distributed ledger built with the NXT distributed cryptographic platform. The project’s open-source code is available on GitHub .
The NSD, a member of the Moscow Exchange, is a Russian nonbanking credit organization, Russia’s central depository and a professional securities market player. The organization provides depository, banking settlement and relevant services to market players.
“Over the past ten years, the global financial infrastructure has faced the challenges that make us review the approaches to reliability, security and performance of information systems,” said Eddie Astanin, chairman of the executive board at NSD. “It is obvious for us that ignoring the rapid development of fintech and upgrading the outdated platforms could hinder the stable development of the Russian financial system. Fortunately, Russian specialists are among the most experienced in the global fintech industry, and we have proven this fact by implementing a fully functional prototype of e-proxy voting system based on blockchain. After testing blockchain for bondholder meetings, we can extend the use of this technology to other business areas of NSD."
E-proxy voting is an innovative technology for corporate actions processing that provides for electronic interaction between securities holders and issuers for the purpose of exchanging information and documents. E-proxy technology was introduced at NSD in August 2014. In April 2015, NSD upgraded the technology, bringing it in line with global ISO standards. In April 2016, a blockchain-based prototype of e-proxy voting was successfully tested for bondholder meetings.
"After our work group analyzed the use of blockchain in several areas of NSD activities, we opted for the automation of the voting process at the annual securities holders meetings,” said Sergey Putyatinskiy, IT Director at NSD. “Over the period of four months, we managed to […]
