The tangled and highly opaque picture of a purely bilateral market is replaced by the neat hub-and-spoke network in which a CCP is buyer to every seller, and seller to every buyer, allowing netting and greater transparency for participants and regulators alike. Of course, reality is not so elegant, as Figure 2 illustrates.
Since 1999, for instance, the share of instruments denominated in euros has risen by more than 10 percentage points to over 30 per cent of the world total; that of the dollar stands at 44 per cent. For the time being the currency is still mainly regional, its use outside the area being largely confined to bordering countries.