Talking DLT and Post-Quantum Blockchain with Richard and Kostas of R3
The past several months have been extremely busy for the R3 team as far as high-profile events are concerned. CordaCon took place in London in September, and was followed by Sibos in Sidney in October. I do not think that R3 will be missing Singapore Fintech Festival in November either. I talked to Richard Gendal Brown, CTO, and Kostas Chalkias, Lead Cryptographer, at the event in London.
My faux pas!
By now, you have probably noticed that Kostas is not in the photo. That’s a faux pas of mine! I hope you will all forgive me, including Kostas! Hence, I have linked to his twitter account (please click on his name above) so you can see that he is as handsome as Richard and I, and that he also shares lots of awesome content — like this tweet! By the way, have you spotted that my French is improving?
‘Hard work pays off when it meets the right plan of action’
I have to say that I was very pleased to see what a large crowd CordaCon attracted. There were more than one thousand of us! In comparison to the first Corda meet-up I attended, along with ten other enthusiasts only three years ago, this year’s ‘meet-up’ was on a completely different scale.
And, it’s easy to see why! What R3 have achieved so far is quite remarkable: they have brought the Corda platform to maturity and started solving real business problems. Check, for instance, the following two big projects underpinned by Corda: insurance platform B3i and trade finance platform Marco Polo. According to me, these projects are living proof that enterprise blockchain has moved through the trough of disillusionment phase to the upward slope of adoption.
Richard emphasised that, right from the start, they have been building Corda with businesses in mind, especially finance. Just think, for example, of the following business needs: for settlement finality, regulatory compliance, strong identity, and interoperability of any enterprise blockchain platform with existing legacy systems as well as other platforms. These are all very real business needs and Corda addresses them all.
WYSIWIS
I am not sure if it was Richard who coined the above acronym for ‘what you see is what I see’, but I find it rather catchy. It refers to a ‘sine qua non’ in finance for data records between multiple parties in the same transaction to be in sync — no matter if it is the ownership of shares or bonds, or the management of cash or syndicated loans. Corda guarantees that all nodes in a network see the same thing, thus solving the reconciliation and synchronisation problem.
Corda has got many unique features: for instance, it does not broadcast the data to the whole network, but only to those who need to see it. Besides, Corda network can support multiple different consensus pools using different algorithms. Also, Corda does not periodically batch up transactions into a block but confirms each transaction in real-time. All this increases privacy of transactions and enables Corda to achieve high network-level transaction rates.
A million-dollar question: How fast is Corda?
Corda Enterprise, the commercial distribution of open source Corda platform, has recently achieved, in a high intensity test with a client and a partner in a Corda network, over twenty thousand transactions per second. That’s over several hundred transactions per second per node. It compares well with the fastest system, VISA, with twenty-four thousand transactions per second.
Over ten million developers can program for Corda right now!
If you wish to have a go yourself, check Corda’s ‘Start Coding’ page. They have also created a Virtual Bootcamp on YouTube!
So, how is it possible that over ten million developers can program for Corda right now? That’s because Corda supports the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). One can write in Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, and any other JVM language. Though, not in Java Script!
Richard told me that, in the future, even that might change because Oracle is working on a technology called GRAAL, an advanced addition to the JVM, which will support many more languages such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, as well as LLVM*-based languages such as C and C++.
The ease of development and large number of developers are not the only advantages. By virtue of running on the JVM, Corda’s applications are able to talk to the existing databases. That’s a huge plus!
The one and only Blockchain firewall
Corda’s blockchain firewall is one of the key features of Corda Enterprise. At the moment, no other enterprise blockchain has a firewall!
How does it work? Richard’s explanation was very comprehensible: a Corda node is deployed mostly inside a bank’s data centre so that it can talk to all of its core systems. However, the bit that needs to talk to the outside world and connect to other entities is what is actually called the Corda firewall. It sits on the Internet, and is greatly hardened since it is the point that is exposed to the rest of the world. It checks not only the IP addresses of incoming connections, but also their certificates. That means that all incoming connections need to cryptographically prove that they should be on the network before any data is allowed through into the bank.
Tokenisation and Cordite
We did also talk about tokenisation since I wanted to know if I could create my own token on Corda. I learned that Cordite was an open source project specifically designed to enable the Corda community to launch their own crypto assets. In short, financial institutions are now able to issue and receive digital representation of various assets that are traded by regulated institutions, e.g. complex derivatives, tokenised cash and corporate bonds.
Why is this particularly important? Because those enterprise tokens will enable 24/7 transactions, settled with finality, while also meeting all the regulatory obligations. Moreover, Corda supports multiple enterprise tokens on the same network and enables complex transactions.
As a side note, have you already realised how vast the tokenisation potential is? Tokens are so versatile that on-chain and off-chain assets as well as contracts will be tokenised in the future.
Post-quantum Signatures
Taking into account that quantum computing era is approaching, I wanted to learn more about the threat it poses to the existing cryptographic systems — which are said to become hugely insecure almost overnight.
Since blockchain signatures are based on classical cryptography, powerful quantum computers will be able to fake them easily, thus compromising blockchain security. Let me remind you how important blockchain signatures are: they make transactions immutable and show who signed them.
To solve the problem, the Corda team, led by Kostas, did a lot of research in a field called Post-quantum Signatures and created an algorithm called Blockchained Post-Quantum Signatures (BPQS). It’s public and already available. Just follow the link to the paper the team published! The technology is generic and can be used with any blockchain.
Here is how the solution works: the Corda team based their digital signatures on hash functions only, and linked them into a chain. There is no advanced math, no elliptic curves, and no factorization! Why? Well, for unstructured problems, like hash functions, quantum computers seem to provide an insignificant speedup, which means that just doubling the key size provides more than enough security.
However, the team’s challenge was to create an optimised signature for blockchain use cases — that is, to minimise its size enough so it can be injected into the Blockchain and used more than once.
If you have any questions about BPQS or Corda, please post them below! Both Richard and Kostas will be happy to answer them.
In anticipation, I will mention that Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) will be available on Corda in a few months’ time and will initially be used for confidential transactions.
Just one more thing!
I have to omit many other things we discussed including Ricardian** contracts. I have already written a lot about distributed ledger technology and know that you are familiar with the topic. However, I have to mention just one more thing — a CorDapp store!
R3 Marketplace is a growing ecosystem of institutions, and a library of applications and services on Corda. It is a platform worth exploring if you are looking for a CorDapp, or need help building and deploying your own.
Wishing you all a great day!
*Low-Level Virtual Machine is a compiler, a tool for building languages.
**A Ricardian contract places all information from a legal document in a format that can be executed by software. This way it is both a legal agreement and a protocol that integrates the agreement securely within a digital infrastructure. It is readable both by machines and people. Machines read the contract within digital infrastructures and people read them as a plain text document.
