Announcing the Corda Introductory Whitepaper

The Wall Street Journal had a couple of good pieces this morning that describe some of the work we’re doing at R3 and our vision for the future of financial services.

Project Concord is our codename for the overall vision, with Corda as our underlying distributed ledger software.

I first wrote about Corda back in April and we demonstrated it in public for the first time a few weeks later.  Since then, we’ve been continuing to develop the code base in collaboration with our members, trialling it through an ongoing series of proofs-of-concept, prototypes and more advanced deployments, refining the design and maturing our thinking.

As part of this process, we wanted to share more information with the broader community about what we’re doing.  I’m pleased to announce the release of our first whitepaper on Corda: an introductory, non-technical overview that explains our vision, some design choices and outlines the key concepts underpinning the platform.  We’ll follow this up in the coming months with a more detailed technical whitepaper.

The whitepaper, which you can download here, explains how we set ourselves the challenge of starting with the financial industry’s pain points: duplicated, inconsistent data and business logic and redundant business processes – and asked ourselves if we could apply breakthroughs in distributed ledger and blockchain technology to solve them.

Our conclusion is that distributed ledger and blockchain technology represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the economics of data management across the financial industry. But there’s a problem because the blockchain and distributed ledger platforms that led us to this exciting moment were never designed to solve the problems of financial institutions and do not meet all our needs: we need tight linkage to the legal domain; we have an obligation to prevent client data being shared inappropriately and so can’t send all transactions to all network participants; we must integrate and interoperate with existing financial infrastructure; and more.

Corda is the outcome of the analysis we did on how to achieve as many of the benefits of distributed ledger and blockchain technology as possible but in a way that is sympathetic to and addresses the needs of regulated financial institutions. Corda is intended to be a contribution to the plurality of technologies that will be adopted in the coming years, one that is targeted specifically and with a laser-focus on the needs of financial institutions.

I hope you find the whitepaper interesting and illuminating and we would love to hear your feedback.