The ASX has confirmed in a June 30 announcement that it has decided to officially delay the rollout of its DLT replacement for CHESS until April 2022, one full year behind the initial target launch date.
ASX Deputy CEO, Peter Hiom had the following to say about progress to date:
We are approaching an important and exciting phase of the project, involving close collaboration between ASX and CHESS users, as they test their systems and begin operational readiness activities. In developing the revised implementation plan, ASX has been very mindful of the challenges the industry faces during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In particular, the ASX identified the following milestones which have been reached since it's previous timeline update in March 2020:
The CHESS replacement application and the distributed ledger have been successfully deployed to several ASX technology environments across multiple data centres;
A seventh software drop has been deployed on schedule into the customer development environment (CDE), which represents 89% of the core clearing and settlement functionality used by customers;
Thirty-four organisations have connected to the CDE, including software providers, brokers and share registries.