Corda’s “API Stability” promise is an industry-first and means you can build on Corda with confidence. The roadmap for large-scale DLT deployment is now clear: it’s time to make your choice.

Corda 1.0 is here!

Corda – the world’s only distributed ledger platform designed and built from the ground up to record, manage and synchronise contracts and other shared data between trading partners – reached a critical milestone today: version 1.0 and, with it, core API stability.

API stability marks the point at which Corda’s contract with application developers is made firm: you can develop your applications on Corda 1.0 and, as we continue to enhance and mature the platform, you can upgrade with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the core APIs won’t change underneath you.

This is a critical landmark on the industry’s path to widespread adoption of enterprise blockchain technology and DLT and it is a promise that no other competing platform has made.

Build on Corda with confidence.

But why does this matter?

It matters because Corda solves a hitherto intractable problem in commerce.

The problem is easy to state and hard to solve. Every major firm around the world has built systems to manage their relationships and contracts with their trading partners. And each of their trading partners has done the same. Information is recorded by each of them multiple times, in multiple places, in multiple different ways and the information just never lines up properly. Each system is different. Each system has different bugs. And it costs an immense amount of money to keep them in sync and deal with the problems that arise when they’re not.

And this means that business leaders simply can’t move as fast as they need to in today’s world.

Here are some examples of the problem:

• The duplication and inconsistency in today’s payment systems means it takes too long to move money around the world: multiple banks have to update multiple different systems and reconcile to check they calculated the same balances.
  • With Corda, banks can settle their massive obligations to each other, round the clock, with maximal liquidity savings, even as new payments are arriving all the time and without a stop-the-world central service.

• Today’s supply chains and international trade are too expensive because, in part, of too much paper and too few systems that can talk to each other.
  • With Corda, innovative software firm TradeIX and multiple major banks are building a platform to automate the pre- and post-shipment financing for buyers and sellers around the world on an open account basis.

• The need for reconciliation and batch processing is one of the reasons why it takes so long to settle securities transactions, needlessly tying up liquidity and capital.
  • With Corda, firms can transact commercial paper deals instantly and without a paying agent or clearing system, as recently proven by Commerzbank. Or they can enable collateral to move without friction with new liquidity marketplaces from startups like HQLA^x.

Corda is the only distributed ledger platform designed from the ground up to solve these problem by addressing the root cause.  With today’s version 1.0 release, we tell the world’s developers that it’s time to make your choice: build on Corda’s stable core API and create the next generation of distributed applications!

I wrote in 2015 that the wave of innovation that had been catalysed by Bitcoin was actually two phenomena: the emergence of decentralised crypto-assets and an entirely new way of solving a hitherto intractable problem in finance and commerce more generally. With Corda 1.0, this second blockchain revolution is now upon us.

With Corda, multiple parties who don’t fully trust each other can nevertheless collaborate to manage their shared data and this can have big implications for commerce.   It means we can envisage a future where I can look at my books and records and know, for sure, that what I see is what you see.

And if I can do that then we can transact in confidence, making business decisions in real-time, automating our joint activities with certainty: the promise of smart contracts. Facts recorded by the ledger can be regarded as authoritative rather than “shadows” of authoritative data held elsewhere, enabling settlement to take place directly across the platform.

Commerce without friction.

This is the opportunity Corda was designed for and, with Corda 1.0, the world’s developer community now has access to an open-source platform with a solid foundation that will take you with it as it continues to mature.

Corda’s unique design is the result of an intense period of research, development and design that included hundreds of senior technologists from across the global financial system, and the open source community, who have been actively engaged with Corda since we open-sourced it in November 2016.  Indeed, it was through our open source community that we discovered that Corda is applicable to far more than just finance! We’re seeing use-cases in government, insurance and beyond.

And, by working with experts and leaders at our extensive list of partners at firms such as Microsoft, HPE, Cognizant, Calypso, our community gains from the collective wisdom and shared learning that comes from a true collaborative community.

So why did the initiatives above (and so many more) choose to build on Corda, in many cases, switching to Corda after evaluating other technologies? We hear several reasons repeatedly given:

• “My business problem is all about keeping records in sync with my trading partners and automating the activity that surrounds them.”
  • Corda’s smart contract engine takes an individual agreement or contract as its building block. No need to worry about abstract concepts like shared virtual machines: think in business terms and solve your problem directly.

• “My business dealings are complex; agreeing new terms requires negotiation… I need to be able to communicate back and forth with my trading partners.”
  • Corda’s unique flow framework makes it really simple to automate workflows between parties without writing complex event-driven code or dealing with asynchronous callbacks. No other platform has anything like Corda’s flow framework. The flow framework is what makes this decentralised, confidential netting solution so powerful.

• “I need to integrate with existing systems easily.”
  • Corda writes its data directly into a relational database for you to query and uses well-understood and time-tested integration tools such as message queues (MQ) to move information around. Corda is built to integrate..!

• “I need to deliver my solution quickly.”
  • Corda is designed for developer productivity. Developers can write their apps in Java – which over seven million developers know and the platform has been engineered for a thoughtful and delightful developer experience. This is enterprise software that developers actually like to use!

• “ I don’t want to have to build the solution myself.”
  • Corda has a thriving ecosystem of software vendors and consultancies who have independently discovered the platform and are choosing to build their applications and delivery practices around it. Our partner team can introduce you to a firm who can meet your needs.

• “I don’t want to be left on an evolutionary dead-end if I adopt DLT early.”
  • With Corda 1.0, you know your future is protected; you can upgrade to new versions of Corda and your applications won’t need to be extensively rewritten. What’s more, with 1.0, R3’s successful funding round, Corda’s large and growing open-source community and our extensive network of partners, Corda is now established as one of the few general-purpose DLT platforms that will still be standing when the market consolidates.

• “I need my business dealings to be private.”
  • Corda is designed only to share data with those with a legitimate need to know – just the information needed to allow them to validate the provenance of facts on the ledger and no more: provenance with privacy. And Corda is designed from day one to work with Intel’s SGX privacy technology as it rolls out.

Get started with Corda today

So, if you haven’t already, now is the time to jump in to the Corda community and on LinkedIn.  The whole team is on slack.corda.net and you can get started here!