AS15989 SFTI-EU

Three generations of financial exchange companies, all still named in one routing record.

What it's used for

• An exchange operator's regional network. Twelve IPv4 prefixes announced, no IPv6, four thousand six hundred and eight addresses, across four observed BGP neighbours.

Notable

• The AS handle is four letters for a secure financial trading network and two for the region, naming the service rather than the company.
• Seven blocks share a netname built from a stock exchange group's initials, the region, the block's base address in hyphens, and its prefix length spelled out as a number on the end.
• Those seven are registered to that exchange group's registry role and to a derivatives exchange under its older administration name.
• The remaining five carry a five-letter netname for a clearing corporation of a board of trade, and are registered to that corporation in full, with no abuse role listed at all.
• The holder, the exchange group on most netnames, the derivatives exchange in the contacts, and the clearing corporation on the rest are four distinct organisations.
• Eighteen addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• Financial exchanges consolidate faster than registries update. Each merger leaves the acquired company's name embedded in netnames and contact fields, and nobody rewrites them because the addresses keep working either way.
• A clearing corporation is the party that stands between buyer and seller so that neither has to trust the other. Its addresses ending up under a modern exchange group is a whole era of market infrastructure compressed into five letters.