Last week Bitcoin Magazine reported that 11 member banks of the R3 consortium, a collaborative group of the world’s largest and most influential banks and financial institutions, participated in a pilot test of the Ethereum-based blockchain network. The banks connected on an R3-managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger , powered by Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in the Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) cloud, to execute simulated financial transactions instantaneously.
R3 is expanding its comparative evaluation project to include other banks, distributed ledger technologies and cloud computing platforms. The latest R3 announcement reveals that the group experimented with five distinct blockchain technologies in parallel in the first test of its kind. The trial represented the trading of fixed income assets between 40 of the world’s largest banks across the blockchains, using five different distributed ledger technologies built by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel.
“[The banks] evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each technology by running smart contracts that were programmed to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemption of commercial paper, a short-term fixed income security typically issued by corporations to raise funding,” notes the R3 press release , which includes informative statements from the companies whose technologies were assessed in the trial.
“This development further supports R3’s belief that close collaboration among global financial institutions and technology providers will create significant momentum behind the adoption of distributed ledger solutions across the industry,” said R3 CEO David Rutter. “These technologies represent a new frontier of innovation and will dramatically improve the way the financial services industry operates, in much the same way as the advent of electronic trading decades ago delivered huge advancements in efficiency, transparency, scalability and security.”
Each of the distributed ledgers ran a smart contract based on identical business logic to enable the banks […]
