Investors today have to wait as long as three days for their equity trades to clear and settle, but that could change thanks to the technology underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

We live in a technology-enabled world of instant gratification. Eager to read the latest best seller? You can download it from Amazon in a matter of seconds. Need a ride across town? Uber can have a driver at your door in just minutes. Don’t feel like cooking? Grubhub will deliver from one of 50,000 takeout restaurants in the U.S. in less than an hour. But if you want to buy or sell shares of a publicly traded company, you typically have to wait three days to clear and settle the trade — a vestige of a time when Wall Street brokerage firms employed messengers who marched across lower Manhattan delivering stock certificates.

The financial services industry is working with U.S. regulators to fix the problem. On September 5, 2017, the current settlement period, commonly referred to as T+3, will be reduced by one day, to T+2, but even that time frame comes across as antiquated in the age of the Internet. Instead, the solution may lie in a seemingly unlikely and arcane place: the distributed ledger technology underpinning the controversial cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

The idea of public distributed ledgers burst onto the recent scene in 2009 with the introduction of Bitcoin, whose founders’ identities are concealed under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin has captured the imagination of the public by proposing the first cryptographic electronic currency issued without central authority and having no intrinsic value. The key components of the Bitcoin infrastructure are the private–public key cryptographic signatures, the immutability of its blockchain distributed ledger and the prevention of double spending through Bitcoin mining based on proof of work. A Bitcoin itself is just a long chain of transactions that can be traced all the way back to the time when it was minted. To date, about 16 million Bitcoins have been minted, of which 3 million to 5 million may have been irretrievably lost.

While extremely impressive in its technical conception and execution, the Bitcoin ecosystem is clearly unsuitable for the purposes of high finance, not least because it cannot solve the all-important know-your-customer and anti–money laundering problems. Bitcoin’s narrow nature and low transaction-per-second capacity are also troublesome. However, for the past five years or so, numerous efforts have begun to adapt Bitcoin’s most important feature — namely, distributed ledger — to solve some of the financial world’s more vexing infrastructure problems.

Currently, most financial information is kept in centralized ledgers maintained by private banks, asset managers, custodians and other parties. In a centralized ledger, storage devices all connect to a common processor and the writing access is tightly controlled. By contrast, in a distributed ledger all storage devices are independent and many participants have writing privileges. In principle, it is possible to store some financial information in a distributed ledger, provided that it is immutable and resilient.

There are several types of distributed ledgers, varying from the simplest extensions of traditional centralized ledgers to permissioned private distributed ledgers, represented by Digital Asset Holdings and consortium R3 CEV, to permissioned public ledgers such as Ethereum and Ripple, and finally to the most complex nonpermissioned public ledgers, like the one used by Bitcoin. The usage of a specific ledger depends on the problem at hand. In legacy banking, which requires no joint ledger writing access, a centralized ledger does the job. If participants do need joint writing access but know each other in advance, have aligned interests and can be trusted — as is the case in clearing and settlement — a permissioned private distributed ledger can be employed.

At the moment, the number of parties required to trade shares is very large and, in addition to the buyer and seller, involves brokers, central securities depositories, clearing counterparties, custodians and exchanges, to mention but a few. Moreover, although trading on exchanges is very fast and might occur in milliseconds, the subsequent process of clearing and settlement typically takes several days, requires numerous reconciliations and is prone to frequent failures.

In principle, by introducing shares directly into a permissioned private distributed ledger, it is conceivable to dramatically reduce the number of parties involved in the process of trading securities, while at the same time increasing the speed, robustness and regulatory compliance of the process as a whole. Of course, I’m not talking about instantaneous settlement. Although theoretically possible, that would eliminate many advantages of the existing process, such as anonymity, netting and the ability to borrow, as well as jeopardize the all-important delivery-versus-payment setup whereby money and title change hands. Still, the implementation of distributed ledger technology could significantly shorten the clearing and settlement process and make it significantly cheaper than it is now. Investors would not be the only ones to benefit. Companies would also stand to gain from the potentially more efficient allocation of capital.