The R3 consortium of financial institutions working on a blockchain-based solution to improve the financial services infrastructure has released an update on its initiative, which it calls “Corda.”
Since the R3 consortium has continuously drawn more members among major institutions since it began six months ago, it has naturally attracted attention from the fintech and financial communities. The recently-released update gives insight into how Corda plans to serve the financial industry and what makes it different from other financial blockchain initiatives.
R3’s overriding mission, shared by other initiatives, is to save money, decrease transactional errors and significantly increase settlement speeds. What Is Corda?
Corda’s names comes from two sources, Richard Brown, R3’s chief technology officer, told Bloomberg . The first part of the name sounds like “accord.” The second part is from the definition of a chord, the shortest straight line between two points on a circle. The circle represents the banks that make up the R3 network.
Brown, in an R3 blog , summarized Corda’s key features as follows:
• No unnecessary global sharing of data: only 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 at the level of individual deals between firms, not at the level of the system
• The design directly enables supervisory and regulatory observer nodes
• Transactions are validated by the parties to the transaction rather than a broader pool of unrelated validators • It supports a variety of consensus mechanisms • It records an explicit link between smart contract code and human-language legal documents • It is built on industry-standard tools • There is has no native cryptocurrencyWhen the code has further matured, Corda will be open sourced. Blockchain Reality Versus Hype Brown noted that […]
