Silicon Valley Spotlight: R3 CORDA
A brief overview of the future of Blockchain for business
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship event hosted by Indra and Intel Capital in Madrid. Among many other startups and successful companies from Silicon Valley, it was R3 the one that most captivated my attention.
This week, we heard that ING bank signs a 5-Year licensing deal with R3 to have unlimited access to the Corda Enterprise Platform. This is nothing surprising: ING is now one of the more than 200 partners and members of the Corda ecosystem.
David E Rutter founded R3 in 2014, and they led the consortium created in 2015 alongside Barclays, BBVA, CBA, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS.
Today, R3 has more than one hundred employees and raised $112M in 2 rounds, being the first one the most relevant with $107M. They have an estimated yearly revenue of $3M, according to CrunchBase.
In the middle of last year, we read worrying news about R3 financial situation: they were apparently running out of money and making some questionable decisions, according to former employees. However, the positive deals closed during the end of 2018 speak for themselves.
R3 business model revolves around their main development: CORDA.
What exactly is CORDA?
Corda is an open-source Blockchain platform designed for business. Actually, some experts agree that Corda’s technology is not exactly Blockchain. However, that is what they claim to do for conceptual similarity and marketing reasons:
However, R3 usually described Corda as a shared ledger. The platform offers the possibility to create separate networks, maintaining the interoperability between the different groups.
Corda appeared in the Blockchain market as the generic platform for any solution on the financial industry. Actually, their steps are positioning them as the de facto standard for industrial Blockchain solutions.
Corda focuses on privacy and security to adapt the Blockchain paradigm to the business world. While traditional blockchains are permissionless networks, Corda networks are permissioned. This means that blockchain users are anonymous, but the access to Corda networks is controlled and every user has a proved identity.
Of course, this is a necessary characteristic for developers of regulated institutions, and it allows Corda to get rid of high-consumptions mechanisms like PoW. Actually, Corda networks aim to be fast, and they measure more than 1000 transactions per second.
Will CORDA lead the Blockchain market?
It is too soon to predict that, but we can clearly see that Corda has found the place and the moment to bring the Blockchain to the industry.
According to Gartner, the original Blockchain networks were nothing more than technology enablers. Most of them had flaws, and they helped to consolidate the distributed ledger paradigm.
However, we are already living the second phase of this Blockchain spectrum, and Corda is leading the move towards the third phase together with Hyperledger Fabric.
Conclusions
Stay tuned to R3 movements. They are one of the most relevant actors in the short-term future of distributed ledger technologies. If you plan to use the Blockchain technology in your business, I recommend you to read the technical documentation of Corda.
The Blockchain technology appeared as a disruptive innovation some years ago, but it is now when we are deploying its potential thanks to hybrid solutions like Corda, BigchainDB or XinFin.
Do not hesitate to reach me on LinkedIn.
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