More than a dozen brokers, other market participants and people directly involved in the blockchain project told Reuters the failure had shaken trust in the Australian exchange operator. Some expressed dismay over the time and costs they contributed to the doomed endeavour and ASX’s repeat assurances that all was well with the upgrade, which had faced five delays since an initially scheduled 2020 launch.
On top of the A$245-A$255 million charge ASX plans to take for the debacle, market players estimate that together they spent about that again preparing for the rollout, including on software upgrades, airfares and employee hours spent attending webinars and consultations. Two months later Funke Kupper quit over bribery allegations relating to a previous role; he was cleared. ASX pressed on with the rebuild, and raised its holding in Digital Asset to 8.5 percent.
“To try and put something that’s not been tried and tested into Australia I think was pretty unwise,” said William Slack, managing director of Morrison Securities, which had two staff partly allocated to the ASX project and three or four staff at every ASX consultation for several years. “It would have been easier, I guess, to just build a new version of CHESS in some other modern language, rather than blockchain,” said Ramy Aziz, a former ASX chief financial officer who oversaw budgets, governance and timetables related to the project in its initial stages.
The ASX spokesperson told Reuters that distributed ledger technology could be transformational and the company chose Digital Asset after a “robust global” search. The CEO of a small broker which runs its own trading software, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid harming relations with the exchange, told Reuters he employed four software developers full-time for three years, at a cost of more than A$1 million, to keep up with ASX’s frequent update requirements.