Electronic Trading & Blockchain : Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Trading floors in the 60s and 70s involved hundreds of people shouting bids and offers in multi-coloured jackets standing next to each other in different pits, gesticulating with their hands. The decibel levels were extremely high, so high that traders who traded every day had hearing problems later in life. In 1980, the first widely used electronic trading exchange was established.

On September 1, 1969, the California Commodity Advisory Research Project (CCARP) was formed and housed at UC Berkeley. The project's first aim was to examine the feasibility of an electronic, for-profit exchange. At the time, there were only 12 exchanges worldwide, and none were for-profit — or electronic. Read first-hand from Richard Sandor, the project director and how CCARP was 20 years too early for the financial world.

Readership: Finance students, researchers, and readers interested in learning about the early years of electronic trading in the US.

Richard L Sandor (PhD) is Chairman and CEO of the American Financial Exchange, an electronic marketplace for small and mid-sized banks to lend and borrow short-term funds. He is also the CEO of Environmental Financial Products (EFP), which specializes in inventing, designing and developing new financial markets. EFP was established in 1998 and was the predecessor company and incubator to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the European Climate Exchange (ECX), the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange (CCFE) and the Tianjin Climate Exchange (TCX). Dr Sandor is currently the Aaron Director Lecturer in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School and a Visiting Fellow with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. He was honored by the City of Chicago for his universal recognition as the "father of financial futures". In 2002, he was named by TIME Magazine a "Hero of the Planet"; and in 2007 as one of the magazine's "Heroes of the Environment" for his work as the "Father of Carbon Trading." In October 2013, Dr Sandor was awarded the title of Chevalier dans l'ordre de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor), for his accomplishments in the field of environmental finance and carbon trading. He holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Dr Sandor is a Board Member of the Clean Energy Trust, a Member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Financial Stability and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; and a Senior Fellow of the Milken Institute. He served on the board of directors of leading commodity and futures exchanges in the United States and Europe. Dr Sandor is the author of Good Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation also published in Chinese by People's Oriental Press; the lead author of Sustainable Investing and Environmental Markets: Opportunities in a New Asset Class (published by World Scientific); and How I Saw It: Analysis and Commentary on Environmental Finance (1999–2005) (also published by World Scientific).