R3 (company)

Corda

The consortium's joint efforts have created an open-source distributed ledger platform called Corda especially geared towards the financial world as it handles more complex transactions and restricts access to transaction data. Although it is inspired by blockchain databases, and is expected to have many of the benefits of blockchains, it is not a blockchain.

The aim of Corda is to provide a platform with common services to ensure that any services built on top are compatible between the network participants, whilst still fostering innovation and faster time to market as the underlying infrastructure would be accepted and understood by at least the founding firms.

"If we have one platform with lots of products on top, then we get something that's more like the internet, where we still get innovation but we can still communicate with each other." - David Rutter

Corda's code was open-sourced on November 30th, 2016, and may in the future be contributed to the Hyperledger project. Hyperledger is a cross-industry project led by the non-profit Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology by coming up with common standards.

History

The consortium started on September 15, 2015 with nine financial companies: Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS.

On September 29, 2015 an additional 13 financial companies joined: Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citi, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, Société Générale, and Toronto-Dominion Bank. Financial Times reporter Kadhim Shubber wrote that the new additions are "a sign the industry is gathering behind R3 in one potential implementation of the distributed ledger technology behind the currency bitcoin."

On October 28, 2015 an additional three financial companies joined: Mizuho Bank, Nordea, and UniCredit.

On November 19, 2015 an additional five financial companies joined : BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, ING, Macquarie Group and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

On December 17, 2015, an additional 12 financial companies joined : BMO Financial Group, Danske Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Natixis, Nomura, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Banco Santander, Scotiabank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, U.S. Bancorp and Westpac Banking Corporation.

As of April 25, 2016, three additional financial companies had joined: SBI Holdings of Japan, Hana Financial of South Korea, and Bank Itau of Brazil.

Toyota Financial Services joined in June and MetLife joined in August 2016.

On March 3, 2016, R3 announced that it had completed a trial involving 40 banks held in the last two weeks of February, testing the use of blockchain solutions offered by Eris Industries, IBM, Intel and Chain to facilitate the trading of debt instruments. This was a follow-on to an 11-bank trial conducted earlier in January which used Ethereum hosted on Microsoft Azure.

In November 2016, Goldman Sachs, Santander and Morgan Stanley each withdrew from the consortium.

On December 14, 2016, Credicorp becomes the first Spanish-speaking Latin American member of R3.

Controversy

The decision of R3 to publicly proclaim that the Corda platform they have built is not a "blockchain" garnered criticism on a number of media outlets and microblogging services in early 2017. The assertion of R3 is that they "were never building [a] blockchain", though they were clear to emphasize the fact that they have not abandoned the concept of blockchain altogether. Corda is described as a distributed ledger, which "was never designed to be a traditional blockchain platform".