Abstract
Securities trading systems have settlement efficiency, audit transparency, and fraud prevention concerns due to centralized intermediaries and aging infrastructure. Existing research models risk counterparty trading due to delayed settlements, opaque record keeping, and human compliance checks. The study aims to design and evaluate a blockchain-based equities trading platform for transaction security and traceability. Provable Atomic Consensus for Trading (PACT), a blockchain-based architecture for regulated financial institutions' trading environments, combines hybrid consensus with a privacy-preserving cryptographic approach. A hybridized consensus process for efficient transaction finality, zero-knowledge proof enabled atomic settlements for instant delivery vs. payment while protecting commercial secrecy, and regulator-accessible smart contracts for real-time compliance checks are used in the PACT algorithm PACT found a 20% reduction in consensus finality time, 53% reduction in proof verification time, 56% improvement in smart contract vulnerability, and 42% improvement in auditability index on a permissioned blockchain with hardware-accelerated smart contracts. The study indicated 35.6% lower throughput and 41.7% lower Tx volume over 10 validators. Latency over 10 validators is 24% lower and Tx volume is 23.2% lower than existing research models. Blockchain improves securities infrastructure speed, reliability, and transparency without affecting compliance, according to studies.