Many of the companies working to bring blockchain technology to global financial markets have decided to release the code to their technology as open-source software.

This is according to a new report from Greenwich Associates, which revealed broad support for an open-source approach to help accelerate the time to market for blockchain technology.

The report surveyed 402 global market participants working on blockchain, including banks, brokers, technology companies, exchanges and others. More than half of respondents saw open-source as the best model for distributed ledger technology, with support even stronger among technologists (61 per cent).

However, some 46 per cent of respondents noted their concern about damaging bugs being introduced into the system with an open-source approach, while 47 per cent cited the risk of systems being hacked through vulnerabilities inserted into the code.

Eight in 10 respondents concluded that permissioned blockchains were inherently more secure than public blockchains.

Richard Johnson, vice president of market infrastructure and technology at Greenwich Associates, said: “The goal of many of these new technology companies is to replace the existing global financial market infrastructure with distributed ledger technology. This is a monumental task and as such, support for open-source technology reflects an understanding that transitioning to this new technology can only be achieved by having the widest possible community of developers working on the codebase.

“In the end, a blockchain-enabled financial market will likely consist of a core plumbing of market infrastructure developed by the open-source community, operating beneath proprietary applications that provide a higher level of security,” he added.

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