The Global Technical Committee has reviewed and preliminarily approved the Gap Analysis submitted by the FIX Digital Asset Working Group. It is the first proposal in the area of digital assets and seeks extensions of the FIX Protocol for the trading of digital assets which specifically includes their identification.
The document now enters an extensive public comment period in which public review and feedback is encouraged. Once the public comment period closes, the GTC will review public comments before final approval by the GTC Governance Board.
Please post feedback, comments, and questions as replies to this discussion thread. The public comment period ends on June 17, 2022.
Another proposal: Section 2.2.1 describes how to use Currency(15) and OrderQty(38) fields for dealling currency of quantity fields. But this explanation has only touched half of the currency/digital assets involved in a trading. It is adviced to provide a complete example for this description.
It is not a good term to use WALLET here. In the most popular permisionless blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, one uses “address” for reception purpose. And in the crypto communities, wallet is used for some software/hardware which manages the privates keys and signs transactions. But there can be a many to many relationships between wallet and address(which is useally derived from private keys). That is , a wallet will manage many private keys(and thus, many address), and a private key(and thus addess） can be imported into different wallets and controled by any one of the wallets.
Perhaps the most popular wallet is MetaMask, as a chrome plugin. Hardware wallets, such as LedgerNanoS are also widely used.
By the way, ISO has published ISO 22739 （Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies - vocabulary）, defined common terms used in blockchain and DLT community. It is adviced to reuse the terms defined in an ISO standard, instead of inventing ones own.
In ISO 22739(sorry I can not upload the documents due to copyright), we can find the following 3 related terms:
entry 3.24
DLT account
distributed ledger technology account
representation of an entity (3.34) participating in a transaction (3.77)
entry 3.25
DLT address
distributed ledger technology address
value that identifies a DLT account (3.24) participating in a transaction (3.77)
entry 3.84
wallet
application used to generate, manage, store or use private (3.62) and public keys (3.65)
I believe it is better to use DLT address instead of walet in our standard, both to keep aligned with established ISO standard and crypto community daily practice.
Hi,
Thanks for your comments on use of wallet identifier. I support removing this reference for this gap analysis and analysing further for a future gap analysis to cover post-trade workflows.
Your comments on ISO 22739 are also helpful - I wasn’t aware of that. It’s not clear to me whether the concept of ‘Account’ in FIX (tag 1) maps to a DTL account or a DLT address, or even quite what the difference between the two is. We may need to dip into our Swiss franc money box to find out…
Jim.
Hi - many thanks for your comments. We are in the process of writing a ‘Recommended Practices’ document which will include a lot more detail on how to use these fields under different trading scenarios. If you’re a member of our Digital Assets Working Group, we’ll be reviewing this in meetings of that group. There will also be a public review.
Jim.
I have reviewed the Gap Analysis and have no concerns other than to restate my response to a comment raised earlier on this forum regarding Wallet Identifier. My recommendation is that the paragraph referring to Wallet Identifier be removed and that this be addressed as part of the post-trade analysis scheduled to be undertaken by the Digital Assets Working Group in the second half of this year.
Jim.
Meanwhile, the Gap Analysis has been approved by the GTC Governance Board and is being implemented. As a heads up, it was detected in QC that the proposed FIXML abbreviations in the Appendix A (Data Dictionary) needed to be revised to guarantee uniqueness within their intended scope. The changetracked version of the ASBUILT will reflect this correction. The QC is still ongoing.