The Corda platform, developed by a group of over 70 of the world’s biggest financial institutions participating in the R3-led consortium, is making its code open-source, as reported by Reuters.
The blockchain platform aims to develop banking solutions and represents the shared effort among banks, insurers, fund managers and others in order to explore the potentials of blockchain technology in financial markets. R3 believes that this Corda platform will become the industry standard for the emerging technology by making it publicly available.
"We want other banks and other parties to innovate with products that sit on top of the platform, but we don't want everyone to create their own platform, because we'll end up with lots of islands that can't talk to each other," R3's chief engineer, James Carlyle, told Reuters. “If we have one platform with lots of products on top, then we get something that's more like the internet, where we still get innovation but we can still communicate with each other."
The platform’s code will b e contributed to the cross-industry project led by the non-profit Linux Foundation – Hyperledger – on November 30, 2016, in order to advance blockchain technology by coming up with common standards.
"Blindly investing millions of dollars in small, disparate technology projects is not appropriate for banks at a time when budgets are stretched," David Rutter, R3's chief executive told Reuters. "The risk of backing the wrong horse could far outweigh the potential gains. Given that the power of this technology lies in its network effect, the consortium model is the ideal method to get it off the drawing board and into the wholesale financial markets."
Corda, using blockchain technology can handle more complex transactions, but at the same time, restricts access to transactions. It was specifically developed for the financial world like processing of securities and derivatives, payments, among others.
