Business needs the universal interoperability of public networks but with the privacy of private networks. Only the Corda network can deliver this.

The tl;dr of this post is:

• Most permissioned blockchains use isolated networks for each application, and these are unable to interoperate. This makes no sense.
• We should instead aspire to deploy multiple business applications to an open, shared network. But this needs the right technology with the right privacy model.
• Corda, the open source blockchain platform we and our community are building, was designed for just this from day one. But there was a piece missing until now: the global Corda network.
• In this post I describe the global Corda network for the first time in public and how it will be opened up to the entire Corda community in the coming months.
• If you’re building blockchain solutions for business, you need to read this post…

Think back to how excited you were (well, I was!) when you first heard about Ethereum. The idea of a platform for smart contract applications, all running across a common network, with interoperability between all these different applications written by different people for different purposes. It was mind-blowing.

And it’s not just a vision, of course. The public Ethereum community have actually delivered it! Indeed, emerging standards such as ERC20 are a demonstration of the power of a shared, interoperable network and the power of standardisation.

So the question we asked ourselves at R3 back in 2015 was: imagine if you could apply that idea to business… imagine if different groups of people, each deploying applications for their own commercial purposes, woke up one day and discovered that those apps could be reassembled and connected in ways unimaginable to their creators but in a way that respected privacy and which could be deployed in real-world businesses with all the complexity that entails.

It seemed obvious to us that this was the right vision. And that it would require a universal, shared, open network, the topic of this post.

But it dawned on me recently that this is not how everybody in the permissioned blockchain space sees it. The consequences for users could be serious.

The rest of this post is continued at our medium site here!

View at Medium.com