R3 consortium has announced Corda, a new technology for financial institutions different from blockchain, which the consortium has been working upon for the last 6 month.

Corda is aimed at helping financial institutions sinchronise financial agreements and operate workflow between firms without a central controller. Transactions executed at Corda platform can be validated by parties without appealing to a broader pool of unrelated validators. Still, unlike blockchain, Corda is only partially decentralized, its users being free to choose whether to store the data in a distributed ledger or in a centralized depositary.

Furthermore, Corda is not supporting any native cryptocurrency and is claimed to be easier to integrate within the existing business logic.

In a blog post, R3’s chief technology officer Richard Gendal Brown revealed the main differences between Corda and blockchain:

“We are not building a blockchain. Unlike other designs in this space, our starting point is individual agreements between firms (“state objects”, governed by “contract code” and associated “legal prose”).  We reject the notion that all data should be copied to all participants, even if it is encrypted.”

After 6 month of work, the project has entered a prototype stage. According to Bloomberg, it will be tested by other consortium members over the coming weeks.

Established in 2015, the R3 coinsortium has united world’s leading financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Commerzbank, Societé Generale to research and develop blockchain applications for the financial industry.

This month R3 has become a strategic partner for Microsoft.

Elena Platonova