23 August 2019
Corda is a distributed ledger software for storing, managing and synchronizing contracts and agreements between different financial firms as well as individuals in a secure, consistent, and auditable manner. It was launched in 2016 by R3 together with more than 200 partners. Notably, most of the companies that support Corda are banks and financial companies. Among them are HSBC, U.S. Bank, Barclays and other credible institutions. Like other open-source projects, thousands of developers around the world contribute to the project by adding new features to the main solution.
Essentials Of The Corda Blockchain Framework
The main idea of Corda is to move from authoritative systems-of-record maintained within firms to global authoritative systems-of-record shared between all economic players. Such a system enables businesses to commit transactions directly and in strict privacy using smart contracts while notably reducing costs and streamlining business operations.
In fact, Corda is not the exact type of standard blockchain. According to the founders, it has absorbed the best features from Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks in order to create the ideal platform for a highly specialized purpose: to manage financial agreements between regulated financial institutions (this was stated by R3 CTO Richard G Brown). So, let’s get a more clear understanding of the particular qualities of Corda by comparing it with other popular open-source projects – Hyperledger and Ethereum.
According to the organization, Corda is aimed to assist the other sectors such as
- energy markets (where digitalization of trading in the commodities space can be implemented);
- global trade (implying the use of smart contracts and regulatory compliance through real-time auditing in the business logic flow);
- govtech (which is generally about transaction recording);
- healthtech (where catalog keeping and data recording are crucial);
- and insurance and telecommunications (which relations between network parties could be optimized by means of blockchain technology).
Keeping that in mind, let’s take a look at some examples of Corda’s implementation in real companies.
1. CryptoBLK – letter of credit
CryptoBLK is a Hong-Kong fintech company that provides companies with DLT-based financial solutions. In 2018 CryptoBLK in cooperation with R3 and HSBC created a Corda-based letter of credit platform. Using the platform, HSBC and ING executed the world’s first letter of a credit transaction on a blockchain platform for Cargill. The transaction took less than 24 hours. Now, CryptoBLK is working with R3 to engage more banks to the platform to spread this solution to the world.
Read more at Intellectsoft, here.
