R3CEV

R3CEV is a financial services/distributed ledger technology company responsible for creating R3, the most famous blockchain consortium, which managed to garner the attention of the financial industry.

It has an impressive roster of 70+ members who are working with some of the sharpest minds in the DLT space like Richard Gendal Brown(CTO of R3) and Mike Hearn (former Bitcoin Core Developer) to create a new world of financial services infrastructure and applications using the ideas derived from Blockchain technology.

According to Clemens Wan, Associate Director of R3, they see their technology as one that requires broader buy-in from enterprises and corporates to achieve a strong network effect and important applications. According to Wan, R3’s open sourced DLT platform Corda is similar to XBox Live, in a sense it builds the ecosystem and the connectivity. By focusing on providing the platform and services, R3 will enable its members to innovate using DLT technologies to solve their business problems and build a variety of use cases.

The use cases that are being worked on by R3 members are quite comprehensive:

R3 believes that 2017 will be “The Year of the Pilot” and 2018 will be the year when DLT applications will hit mainstream production.

Image credit: R3 blog.

Corda platform has been open sourced as part of the Linux Foundation’s HyperLedger project. Corda attempts to not replicate the Bitcoin blockchain; rather it takes an enterprise point of view of creating a shared ledger that allows managing financial agreements. Corda was designed to address the pain points, which stop enterprises from embracing DLT technologies fully. To facilitate this, Corda is designed with the following goals in mind, according to Richard Gendal Brown, CTO of R3CEV:

• Corda has no unnecessary global sharing of data: only those parties with a legitimate need to know can see the data within an agreement
• Corda choreographs workflow between firms without a central controller
• Corda achieves consensus between firms at the level of individual deals, not the level of the system
• Corda’s design directly enables regulatory and supervisory observer nodes
• Corda transactions are validated by parties to the transaction rather than a broader pool of unrelated validators
• Corda supports a variety of consensus mechanisms
• Corda records an explicit link between human language legal prose documents and smart contract code
• Corda is built on industry-standard tools (Kotlin, a JVM compatible language).
• Corda has no native cryptocurrency (it rather uses real world currencies).

By addressing those design goals, Corda is able to address blockchain benefits like validity, uniqueness, immutability and authentication within the context of applications for financial services.

Recently R3 and Corda were in the news when they announced that their solution is “blockchain inspired” rather than being an actual blockchain. An interesting analysis about this topic by Chris Skinner can be found here.

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