The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), a clearinghouse operator that says it processed over $2 quadrillion worth of securities trades last year, has moved a distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlement pilot program from “proof of concept” to the development phase, following six months of testing.

The clearinghouse plans to launch the platform, called Project Ion initiative, in the first quarter of 2022. The platform will run alongside the DTCC’s legacy systems as a parallel book and infrastructure for bilateral transactions on DLT. The Depository Trust Co.’s (DTC) existing system will remain the authoritative source of transactions.

The first phase of the project will support bilateral delivery order transactions that will be initiated by participants in the pilot program through nodes hosted by DTCC. The transactions will be processed through the Project Ion platform and then passed to DTC’s existing systems for settlement processing.

“Cryptocurrency, digitized assets, DLT and other innovations increasingly are integral parts of the evolving financial services industry, and we are excited about the future opportunity in each of these areas,” Murray Pozmanter, head of Clearing Agency Services and Global Business Operations at DTCC, said in a press release.

“Project Ion has demonstrated that settlement in a T+1 or T+0 environment are effective use cases for DLT, and we look forward to working with our clients and the industry to launch the new platform,” he said, referring to the number of days it takes for a trade to settle. T + 1 is a trade that is settled a day after the trade is made, for example.