London Stock Exchange Group Ventures into Blockchain to Revolutionize Traditional Asset Markets

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG.L), one of the oldest stock exchanges in the world, has drawn up plans to offer blockchain-based trading of traditional financial assets, the Financial Times reported Monday.

The company has reached an “inflection point,” having examined the potential for bringing traditional markets to blockchain rails for nearly a year and has now decided to take plans forward, LSE Group's Head of Capital Markets Murray Ross told FT.

Ross stressed that the project does not involve cryptocurrencies and only uses the blockchain technology underpinning the digital assets to make buying, selling and holding of traditional assets more efficient.

"The idea is to use digital technology to make a process that is slicker, smoother, cheaper and more transparent . . . and to have it regulated," Ross said.

A blockchain is a distributed, immutable ledger, facilitating record of transactions and tracking assets in a business network.

According to FT, the LSE Group is mulling a separate entity for the blockchain-based markets business and is in talks with regulators, multiple jurisdictions and the U.K. government and Treasury.

The reported move comes as several traditional finance firms look to come on chain to offer tokenised versions of traditional assets like gold and U.S. Treasury notes.