Title: Smart Contracts:Improving cost and functionality of enterprise insfrastructure and transactions
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Name of the Company: R3
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Year incorporated? September 2014
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The founders of the company? David E. Rutter
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How did the idea for the company (or project) come about? R3 attempted to fill a need to utilize existing technology and coding languages to provide enterprise networking infrastructure for blockchain domain. To that end it introduced an open source platform , Corda, which was utilized by a consortium of partners who continue to develop it since it launch in 2016. Corda provides platform to launch a host application in multiple finance domains. Companies can use Corda platform to launch their own applications in insurance, trading, smart contract, and international trade etc. This cut down the cost and time to execute contracts between firms and agnecies across the globe.
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How is the company funded? How much funding have they received?Initially, a consortium of 40 investing companies, including Intel, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, SBI groupm, Tmasek, and HSBC pooled in $107 million to establish this open source blockchanin infrastructure.
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What specific financial problem is the company or project trying to solve? R3 developed Corda to provide a permission distributed legdger blockchain platform to companies so that they could create applications for legally enforceable agreements, automating and executing smart contracts that would reduce the cost and time it takes to process those agreements and contracts.
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Who is the company's intended customer? Is there any information about the market size of this set of customers? R3 targets enterprises level customers across multiple domains including capital markets, trade finance, digital identity, insurance, healthcare, government, supply chain and telecommunications (R3.com)
What solution does this company offer that their competitors do not or cannot offer? (What is the unfair advantage they utilize?) It is a permission block chain in which participants have to be allowed in to participate in certain flow of transactions. Since there is a consortium of big companies that are invested in developing the platform, the nodes or participants are known to each other. Therefore, there is a pre-existing trust among participants that have incentive to promote the credibility of the platform.
- Which technologies are they currently using, and how are they implementing them? (This may take a little bit of sleuthing–– you may want to search the company’s engineering blog or use sites like Stackshare to find this information.) Cadona is using permission distributed ledger blockchain for validation at transaction level. Blocks are validated at the tansaction level and the entire ledger is not validated across all nodes.
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What domain of the financial industry is the company in? Smart contracts and finacial treansactions that are enforceable: making transactions faster and cheaper, it eliminates the need to have audits.
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What have been the major trends and innovations of this domain over the last 5-10 years? there has been a movement towards permission blockchains, since there are uncertainty about public blockchains and their participants. Permission blockchains are designed to be shared with groups having similiar incentives and goals.
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What are the other major companies in this domain? Hyperledger Fabric, and Ethereum. Ripple and Stellar are prominent platforms for tokenization, and in banking, Digital Asset and Axoni are also players.
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What has been the business impact of this company so far? It has already started to give remarkable results both in terms of domestic and international cross bordertransactions. Examples include DXC CuLedger network which utilizes the Corda platform to implement transactions among credit unions. Another impact area has been in trade finance deals, making financing and settlement quicker and more transparent for all parties.
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What are some of the core metrics that companies in this domain use to measure success? How is your company performing, based on these metrics? One of the metrics is wider acceptablity in terms of number of clients that have adopted the platform. Second most important is the variety of industry those clients are coming from. Since the focus of Corda is financial sector, the major criterion of success is adoptability of Corda by financial institutions as a global independent network (medium.com)
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How is your company performing relative to competitors in the same domain? HyperLedger is the main competitor within permission blockchain domain. However it is targeting generalized connectivity among multiple sectors. Corda focusses more on financial secotrs and contracts. Both have relative success in their areas of focus. Corda is leader in terms of backing from banking commmunity.
The most important aspects going forward would be viability and scalability of the application operating at the platform. Thus, instead of offering the platform for wider application areas and to wider array of clients, Corda must focus on consolidation and a limite targetted segments in the market. Focus should remain on development of the platform until the platform becomes viable for wider use. Particularly, keeping the cost of cloud computing down should be a major area of focus going forwards.
https://www.R3.com https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-banks-blockchain-r3-exclusive-idUKKCN12K17E https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/r3-funding-blockchain-intel-bank-of-america-hsbc.html#:~:text=Tech%20Transformers-,Intel%20and%20major%20banks%2C%20including%20HSBC%20and%20BOAML%2C%20pour,%24107%20million%20into%20blockchain%20group&text=R3%20is%20developing%20blockchain%2Dlike,the%20%24107%20million%20funding%20round. https://medium.com/newcryptoblock/hyperledger-fabric-vs-r3-corda-7954035a4884#:~:text=Hyperledger%20is%20part%20of%20a,as%20a%20global%20independent%20network. https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/08/21/1566408930000/More-trouble-in-blockchain-land/