ASX spent five years and A$250M on a blockchain CHESS — then wrote it off

CHESS, the system that clears and settles every trade on the Australian Securities Exchange, was built in the 1990s and was widely considered obsolete. In 2017 ASX announced it would replace it with a distributed-ledger (blockchain) system built with Digital Asset, promising to become the world's first major exchange to run its core market infrastructure on DLT.

The project slipped from the start. Digital Asset missed delivery milestones in July 2021 and the project's internal status was downgraded to "red" by late 2021, yet in February 2022 ASX told the market the project was "progressing well". In November 2022 the exchange abruptly cancelled the program after spending A$245–255 million, and commissioned an independent review.

The cancellation forced ASX back to a conventional rebuild, now being delivered by Tata Consultancy Services with a projected completion around 2029. The regulator ASIC then sued ASX in August 2024 over its market statements on the project, and in a separate action ASX paid a A$20.5 million penalty for the misleading "progressing well" claims.

The failure delayed the modernisation of Australia's core equity settlement infrastructure by close to a decade and left the exchange paying for two systems at once. No investor money was lost directly, but the episode is widely cited as the most expensive failed attempt to put blockchain at the heart of a national financial market.