Barclays this week presided over the first public demonstration of R3’s Corda platform for sharing banking ledgers, according to a report in the International Business Times.
The demonstration occurred at the Barclays Accelerator event organized by Techstars where an internal Barclays team and 10 startups presented their technologies.
The team that demonstrated Smart Contracts Templates utilized the R3 consortium prototype and was led by Lee Braine from Barclays Investment Bank’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.
Braine told the IBT:
“The technology we have used for our demonstration is the R3 consortium’s prototype platform called Corda. What you will now see is the first public demonstration of an application using the underlying Corda platform. This is history in the making.”
He noted that banks have enormous and complex challenges maintaining their own ledger systems and that this unnecessary duplication of labor and cost. Shared ledgers and smart contracts are a solution to these challenges.
Braine added:
“They provide an elegant way to connect the text within legal agreements to the corresponding business logic. I emphasise to you that legal documentation processes can be lengthy, cumbersome and manual. Smart Contract Templates could simplify all of that and, because they are templates designed for reuse, they could drive the industry’s adoption of standards that are legally enforceable.”
The Corda prototype was apparently the product of joint efforts by R3, the University College London, the standards organization ISDA, French banking giant Société Générale and TechStars.
Earlier in April, R3’s CTO Richard Brown unveiled Corda as the consortium’s prototype for a distributed ledger platform for financial services.
A major feature of Corda displayed at the event was that not all the nodes shared information on the ledger. This is a feature that R3 has contrasted with more traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, where all nodes share information, and which is considered more suitable for financial institutions who are concerned about privacy and confidentiality.
