FXCH Ltd., a newly established Clearing House based in Ireland, cleared the first ever Institutional Spot-FX transaction on the blockchain last week. By using a distributed ledger for settlement, the startup accepted and novated its first trades from e-FX trading platforms.

Members can now submit trades transacted on any institutional FX platform to be cleared and settled by FXCH. Blockchain technology offers full transparency to the settlement process, giving trust to the participants in the integrity of the clearing system. 

“We embraced the Blockchain technology for its strongest but most overlooked property: the trust machine. Streamlining steps to settle FX trades at a fraction of the current costs is brilliantly disruptive. But the ledger opens the possibility of creating a level of trust only Tier-1 Banks are enjoying today, without the need to rely on $100Bln balance sheet. That is a true revolution”, Franck Mikulecz, founder of FXCH said in a statement.

Founded in 2015, FXCH is a member-based financial utility for Spot-FX clearing leveraging blockchain technology. It was set up by a team of FX professionals with extensive experience in the institutional FX markets. The company has an office in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia. 

FXCH seeks to solve the counterparty trust problem by organising the governance of its member-based clearing organisation with rules, a guaranty fund and tightly controlled default mechanisms. 

“By combining best of breed blockchain technology with our domain specific know-how, we offer all participants a transparent distributed proof of ownership overcoming the hard trust objections plaguing today’s process of settling FX trades”, Martin Dyring-Andersen, FXCH’s CTO said.