For decades, global financial markets have relied on a hidden but powerful layer of intermediaries. Institutions like Euroclear (1.8bil annual revenue) and Clearstream (45bil Market cap) that handle the complex machinery of post-trade settlement and custody. Every time a trade occurs on an exchange such as the London Stock Exchange (LSE), New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), or Nasdaq, the final ownership of assets is not settled instantly. It moves through multiple parties: brokers, custodians, clearing houses, and central securities depositories (CSDs).
This system works, but it’s slow, expensive, and inherently fragile. A single securities trade may take two or more days to settle (T+2), involve dozens of reconciliation processes, and rely on messaging networks like SWIFT to confirm delivery and payment between counterparties.
That entire model could soon be obsolete and the technology driving that change is never going to be based on smart contracts or probabilistic consensus. It may be based on Contingent Transaction Sets (CTS) and Mathematically Instant Settlement (MIS), the architectural foundation of the DevvX blockchain.
The Problem: Friction in Modern Capital Markets
Post-trade settlement, the movement of securities and cash after a trade has remained largely unchanged for 40 years. This is not shocking, but highlights how antiquated the processes and technologies are!
Today:
Trades are matched on exchanges in milliseconds.
Settlement occurs days later, after reconciliation between custodians, clearing houses, and central securities depositories.
Each intermediary maintains its own ledger, creating a need for constant reconciliation and error handling.
Massive infrastructure costs are built into every transaction to ensure that both sides of a trade fulfill their obligations.
This architecture creates systemic inefficiency. It’s safe — but at a cost. Global markets tie up trillions of dollars in collateral simply to protect against the delay and uncertainty between trade and settlement.
The Breakthrough: Contingent Transaction Sets (CTS)
Unlike smart-contract focused blockchains, which rely on probabilistic consensus and can fork or reorder transactions, DevvX uses Contingent Transaction Sets — a patented technology that allows groups of transactions to be mathematically guaranteed and executed atomically.
Each CTS defines multiple operations that must either all succeed or all fail, ensuring instant finality with zero chance of partial completion. This architecture eliminates the need for an intermediary to guarantee that one leg of a transaction will happen after another.
In traditional systems, intermediaries like Euroclear exist precisely to ensure that delivery and payment occur together (so-called Delivery-versus-Payment, or DVP). In DevvX, DVP happens automatically within the CTS itself. There’s no need for reconciliation, no need for trust between participants — just mathematical certainty at the protocol level.
What That Means for Financial Infrastructure
If an exchange, for example the the LSE, NASDAQ or NYSE were to adopt a ledger built on DevvX’s CTS technology, the implications for the global post-trade system would be profound, entirely game changing!
1. Settlement Finality in Real Time!
Trades that take two days to settle today could complete in milliseconds. There’s no T+1 or T+2 delay, no batch processing, no risk of one party failing to deliver.
2. Custody Becomes Direct
Ownership of securities would live directly on the shared ledger. Every participant such as broker, bank, or investor holds assets in a verifiable wallets, not through an omnibus account managed by a CSD.
3. Corporate Actions Automated
Dividends, interest payments, and even complex actions like rights issues could be automated as deterministic CTS flows. No manual reconciliation or messaging as the logic is baked into the settlement layer.
4. Cross-Border Settlement Simplified
A single blockchain layer can handle both domestic and international securities, removing the need for multiple CSD linkages or correspondent banks. Liquidity could move globally, instantly, with complete transparency and auditability.
5. Systemic Risk Reduced
Because every trade settles instantly and atomically, counterparty risk effectively disappears. That means less collateral locked in clearing houses and lower systemic exposure across the global financial system.
Who Gets Disrupted
The ripple effect of instant, deterministic settlement would be enormous:
Why DevvX’s Model Works Where Others Fail
Many blockchains have promised to revolutionize finance, but few are fit for real-world capital markets. Smart-contract platforms like Ethereum are probabilistic — meaning settlement is not final until several confirmations have passed, and forks are possible. That uncertainty is unacceptable for multi-trillion-dollar securities systems.
DevvX’s CTS and MIS design remove those weaknesses:
No smart contracts: Execution is protocol-level and deterministic.
No forks or rollbacks: Transactions are mathematically final.
Compliant architecture: Built to integrate with KYC, AML, and regulatory frameworks.
Scalability: Designed to handle enterprise and institutional workloads, not just retail blockchain activity.
This combination finally makes blockchain viable for regulated capital markets — not as an experimental layer, but as the core settlement fabric.
The Inevitable Future
If one major exchange operator implements this architecture, it could set a precedent that forces the entire industry to adapt. Just as electronic trading replaced open-outcry pits, atomic settlement will replace T+2.
Once market participants experience settlement finality in milliseconds — with no intermediaries, no reconciliation, and no friction — there will be no going back.
The global post-trade landscape will consolidate from dozens of intermediaries into a single, transparent, deterministic network.
The winners will be those who adopt early. The losers will be those who built their business models on delay, complexity, and trust-based reconciliation.
In short: It is rare in technological history for something new to emerge that redefines the standard for how an entire system or global market operates. DevvX’s Contingent Transaction Sets are that kind of breakthrough. They turn the promise of blockchain into a working foundation for global markets, where settlement is instant, transparent, and mathematically certain. As Tom Anderson, CEO of DevvDigital, explained, “How many times in technological history is something invented that truly becomes a standard that is used ubiquitously? It doesn’t happen often. Examples are the invention of transistors that comprise computer chips, http communications for the internet and smtp communications for email. SQL databases and then the invention of blockchain itself. On the traditional financial innovation side of things, concepts like credit cards, exchange traded funds, and derivatives come to mind, innovations that become ubiquitous in the financial space. This announcement, and our Contingent Transaction Set invention, is one of those types of moments in time. This is the future of all exchanges. This is how assets will be exchanged globally in the future, instantly, with no middlemen, at low cost and high speed and throughput.”
DevvX is not just improving how markets settle. It is redefining the very structure of trust and exchange in the digital economy.