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ASX Ltd (ASX:ASX) has notched fractional gains in early Friday trades on the news it’s ditched its shareholdings in Digital Asset Holdings LLC for A$57 million.
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“The sale will be recognised as part of ASX’s FY25 financial results, with ASX recognising a pre-tax gain of approximately $42 million compared to ASX’s current carrying value of Digital Asset,” the stock wrote on Friday.
If that’s somewhat confusing to you, you’re not alone.
Regardless, there’s a more interesting story here – Digital Asset is a firm based in the U.S. the ASX-listed, to help overhaul its aging CHESS system.
(CHESS is the now-decades-old technology that underpins the market infrastructure that enables share trading and buying in Australia.)
At one point, the ASX wanted to replace CHESS with blockchain, for some reason. That was around the same time COVID hit. Digital Asset may or may not have been a persuasive force, there, but Digital Asset have also worked with Goldman Sachs without any (publicly known) problems.
Then that idea was onto the backburner, which perhaps reflects a flippancy from ASX Ltd management about changing goalposts when it came to the CHESS overhaul – something the Aussie bourse operator was accused of by Digital Asset.
Digital Asset were prompted to speak up when both ASIC and the RBA lashed the ASX over its mishandling of the upgrade to Australia’s stock market tech, and the story became quite a hot topic.
Especially when ASIC moved to sue the ASX for misleading its own investors on the pace of its CHESS program upgrade.
In other words, the regulator has basically accused the stock market of lying.
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The ongoing CHESS bungle is something I’ve covered more than once for HotCopper. While it’s now set to be wrapped up in 2026, as far as this finance journalist is aware, our own regulator is still suing our own stock market.
That’s why it’s maybe amusing that the ASX promised to beef up compliance monitoring in recent history, despite being perhaps not closely monitored enough.
ASX last traded at $72.19/sh.
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