Japan Exchange Group (JPX) announced that it will launch a consortium and proof-of-concept (PoC) testing for capital market infrastructure by utilizing the blockchain technology.

The consortium will have Japanese financial institutions, formed by JPX group companies including Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), Osaka Exchange (OCE) and Japan Securities Clearing Corporation (JSCC). It will continue to perform PoC testing on past findings and explore the applications of blockchain to capital market infrastructure from technical and operational viewpoints. The PoC testing by the consortium will start in spring 2017.

JPX group companies will cooperate with a wide range of stakeholders including financial institutions and distributed ledger technology (DLT) engineers, in a move to make steady progress in verifying the technology. TSE will cooperate with IBM Japan and will create a test environment for PoC using Hyperledger fabric and the open source DLT platform.

“We will seek participation from a wide range of Japanese financial institutions in order to gather broad industrial expertise,” JPX announcement stated.

The DLT applications that are developed by the participating financial institutions, TSX, IT vendors and blockchain startups, will be deployed and tested in an environment facilitating technological development. By verifying various applications, technical and service issues can be identified and addressed.

“We will consider a structure for efficient information sharing between the DLT engineer community and financial institutions through efforts such as training on DLT technology by DLT engineers and training on operational workflows by financial institutions,” it added.

Earlier in February this year, JPX announced its collaboration with IBM Japan to begin conducting PoC for DLT. It established a research group to study the potential applications of DLT to capital market infrastructure.