Beyond the technological challenges or regulatory limitations, this ability to project DLT’s impact is the single largest obstacle to DLT’s rapid growth. How to define the impact that a DLT deployment will have when few have proven its benefits at scale and when the ecosystem dependencies are so significant?

We began 2020 with many business cases being broad and largely conceptual – delivering short term benefits but then opening the door to more significant, longer term efficiencies. Given the high cost of DLT deployments and the insufficiency of short term benefits, the success or failure of many DLT projects relied on organisations’ faith in what may eventually become possible.

As the year progressed, however, applications of DLT became more targeted and more specific – moving away from ecosystem disruption towards solving practical issues in workflows and investment cycles. A new breed of pilots in 2020 have demonstrated quantifiable benefits in securities issuance, corporate actions and other areas – which will pave the way for accelerated innovation in 2021.

With over 79% of firms in our industry now employing dedicated resources to build out their DLT offerings, it is no surprise that we were able to watch DLT’s evolution each month in 2020 from an idea to a live reality.

Up to 18% of investment budgets were spent on DLT projects last year – mainly in the form of strategic holdings in small start ups (which were the preferred path for 57% of respondents). Whilst investor attention remained firmly fixed on crypto assets, banks and brokers concentrated on DLT as a disruptor for their own processes in securities issuance (for illiquid and immobile assets – such as real estate, private debt, etc.), proxy voting, collateral management and securities financing.

Although few projects were fully realised in 2020 (only 1.7% of respondents were fully live with DLT – mainly in the world of FX), the pipeline for projects that will begin to deliver in 2021 is huge. Over 20% of respondents will see DLT live this year.