$31 Million NEX Project Could Be Biggest Casualty of Blockchain Cuts

• Coindesk recounts the woes of NEX’s (formerly ICAP) ‘Infinity’ blockchain project, speculating that the USD31m project could be “the biggest bloodletting the distributed ledger sector has seen to date”.

• Project Infinity was intended to bring NEX’s entire post-trade services portfolio onto one interoperable blockchain architecture.

• As the article notes, NEX’s October 2017 profit warning noted the impact to margins from spending on the blockchain project in its post-trade business.

• However, as Coinbase reports, following NEX’s profit warning, it seems that project Infinity has been significantly scaled back, with project headcount reduced significantly, and the scope of the project much reduced to focus on post-trade FX, according to a NEX source quoted in the story.

Comments

• It's difficult to determine from the Coindesk article whether this is a case of a well intentioned blockchain project encountering the challenges we discussed.

• Anecdotal commentary referenced in the Coindesk report notes the “tough challenge to meet the use case requirements with DLT”, that “throughput had been an issue to begin with”, and the “missed opportunity to get the project out the door”.

• On the other hand, NEX’s move to scale back project Infinity could be driven more by the company’s need to find cost savings ahead of the sale of NEX to CME, a company which has its own blockchain strategy.

What do you think?

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