Pressed by the Congress and regulators, the industry began in the mid-1970s to establish central securities depositories and central counterparties (CCPs) to immobilize paper certificates, encourage multilateral netting of trades, reduce pre-settlement risk through the guarantee of trades, and conduct securities settlements through “book entries” to electronic records.
Even if the products themselves ultimately fail, they advance the development of technologies that are likely to be useful for a range of other purposes. Cryptoassets spurred the development of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which may have many valuable applications.