CORDA Technologies

Working alongside the world’s leading financial institutions, R3 made a conscious decision to leverage blockchain technology to solve real business problems in both complex and highly-regulated markets. We recognized that there wasn’t a blockchain platform on the market that could solve them, so we built one from the ground up. That’s Corda.

In 2016, R3 launched Corda as an open source blockchain platform with the support of a vibrant community of organizations and developers. In 2018, we launched Corda Enterprise, which harnesses the core elements of Corda open source and fine-tunes them to meet the service and network infrastructure requirements of today’s highly regulated industries.

Today, R3 has transformed from a bank consortium to an enterprise software firm whose customers continue to reap the benefits of the vibrant communities we have built around the Corda platform. Both builders and explorers benefit from two interoperable and fully compatible distributions of Corda.

Nearly every function across the healthcare value chain is primed for a blockchain solution. Pharmaceuticals who manage patents and applications seek more secure ways to manage and track IP catalogues and patent applications. Patient administration and record keeping burdens healthcare. Medical insurers manage large amounts of data to design policies and customized plans, file and process claims adjudication, and manage insurer billing and claims settlement. Even medical equipment companies require more streamlined supply chains.

We believe R3 can change the world. We encourage a diverse and inclusive workforce where no idea is too small, and no two days are the same. If you enjoy working in a dynamic, collaborative, and ever-evolving environment, R3 is the place for you. Our team members are pre-eminent technologists, global business leaders and founders, imaginative thinkers, developers, engineers, and self-starters. We hail from diverse companies and backgrounds—everything from bitcoin and Google to world-leading financial institutions.

I’ve recently started a project (top secret, can’t say anymore) which involves using Corda. So, what is it? If you’ve found this post on Google then you probably already have some sort of idea, but if you’ve come from most other sources then it most likely doesn’t sound familiar. Well, Corda is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT for short). Some might say this is a blockchain, but I definitely believe it has its differences from other blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin and is more similar to other DLTs such as Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum (which itself is a fork of Ethereum). These differences are important. They are what allow Corda to perform better for its particular use cases. In this post I will give a brief overview of the factors that influenced the design of Corda.

Expanding on what I said in the introduction, Corda is a Distributed Ledger Technology to be used by businesses, such as financial institutions, to keep a shared ledger of transactions and thus removing the need for the involved parties to constantly check that each of their books are in line after interacting with each other. This is the primary problem that Corda is trying to solve.

Following on from this, since it is designed to allow interacting parties to make sure they are all in line, it also removes the need for all parties on the Corda network to know about each and every transaction, as only those involved are interested in them. Both of these points really need to be expanded upon and to do this we need to take a proper look into the problems Corda is attempting to solve so we can fully understand why Corda chose to make these fundamental decisions.