Banking blockchain technology company, R3 CEV, revealed yesterday the completion of a distributed ledger experiment involving eleven of the largest global financial institutions.
R3 and eleven of the 42 banks that joined its consortium, Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo, each connected to a managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger using Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform the is offering a Blockchain as a Service (BaaS).
The participating banks were able to execute financial transactions instantaneously across the global private network. The banks were able to simulate exchanging value through tokenized assets on the blockchain without the need for a centralized third party.
R3 hopes that experiment is perceived as a milestone in the collaboration with a significant number of major banks in utilizing a multi-lateral distributed ledger and a major step forward for the application of blockchain technology across the global industry.
The company notes that the collaborative experiment is the first in a series of projects, using a range of candidate distributed ledger technologies, and is designed to prove suitability of distributed ledgers for financial markets use cases.
David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented:
The transition from vision and hypothesis to application and execution signifies the next major step towards using this technology to transform how institutions interact, report and trade with each other in financial markets. This is a very exciting development, both for R3 and our member banks, as well as the global financial services industry as a whole.
Since launching its consortium in September 2015, R3 has apparently been running industry collaborative joint working groups with its 42 member banks to design and deploy advanced shared ledger technology in the global financial sector, incorporating multiple open source technologies and standards.
The banks that have joined the project include Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BMO Financial Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, CIBC, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ING Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Macquarie Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Natixis, Nomura, Nordea, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Scotiabank, State Street, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, SEB, Societe Generale, TDĀ Bank, UBS, UniCredit, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and Westpac Banking Corporation.
