Analysis of Scalable Blockchain Technology in the Capital Market

Abstract: Financial interactions on the capital market involve a wide variety of actors and processes. The requirement of security and privacy results to a large extent in non-shared and unintegrated databases among the different parties, leading to complex, time consuming and costly procedures. The last decade's introduction of innovative blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin, has brought attention to the possibilities of decentralized peer-to-peer networking in general, and its potential influence in the financial sector in particular. This master thesis investigates the possibilities for the capital market to adapt such a system from a technical point of view, with main focus on scalability. The analysis covers crucial aspects such as a peer-to-peer application's ability to handle large transaction volumes while maintaining security. The degree project also includes continued work on Visigon's blockchain application prototype with main focus on the network communication, as well as simulations of its performance capability. Results from the simulations showed that the transaction throughput capacity is limited to the time of broadcasting the transaction to the network, and thus decreasing linearly with increasing network size. The required time for handling other parts in the process appears constant and takes up a small fraction of the total time, therefore future work lays in further optimization of the communication protocol.