The clearing firm behind a tokenized securities platform tied to the New York Stock Exchange will run on Avalanche, which is supplying the core ledger technology. Trades handled by that clearing infrastructure will be recorded and settled on the chain’s ledger. No launch date for the platform appears in the announcement.
No game is involved here, as this is a finance story. Avalanche players have a reason to pay attention anyway: the chain behind their games has been chosen for settlement work at exchange grade.
Avalanche’s role in the platform
NYSE belongs to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), a group whose businesses span exchanges, clearing, fixed income and data services. The platform has not launched yet, and Avalanche supplies the core ledger that supports its clearing infrastructure.
The announcement identifies Dennis Lee as Head of Digital Issuance at NYSE. According to Lee, a ledger that records and settles trades needs to be fast and reliable. He added that its costs need to be predictable and that it must be able to control who takes part. Avalanche fits those requirements, the announcement says.
The announcement sets out what financial-market infrastructure requires:
- reliable performance through periods of heavy activity
- fast and certain settlement
- clean recovery when something fails
- predictable capacity and costs
- control for market operators over the systems they depend on
Dedicated chains versus shared infrastructure
On Avalanche, an institution can either place a financial product on the existing Avalanche infrastructure or build a dedicated blockchain for its own business. The announcement says a dedicated chain hands a market operator more control over performance, capacity, economics, permissions and the way the system runs. It describes that as the path for NYSE.
Studios building games on Avalanche make the same decision, choosing between the shared network and a dedicated chain they run themselves. For the NYSE platform, the dedicated model is the one being used.
Institutions already using Avalanche
The announcement names earlier institutional users of the chain:
- BlackRock’s BUIDL is available on Avalanche, alongside tokenized investment products from Franklin Templeton, Apollo, KKR, Janus Henderson and other asset managers.
- Goldman Sachs uses Avalanche for institutional payments and settlement through Lynq.
- Progmat, in Japan, is building institutional tokenization infrastructure on Avalanche.
According to the announcement, most NYSE customers will likely never know Avalanche is part of the setup. The products remain NYSE products, with the chain running underneath them.