R3 (company)

R3 (R3CEV LLC) is a distributed database technology company. It leads a consortium of more than 70 of the world biggest financial institutions in research and development of blockchain database usage in the financial system. It is headquartered in New York City. It was founded in 2014 by David E Rutter. The current CTO is Richard G Brown.

The consortium's joint efforts have created an open-source distributed ledger platform called Corda especially geared towards the financial world as it handles more complex transactions and restricts access to transaction data. Although it is inspired by blockchain databases, and is expected to have many of the benefits of blockchains, it is not a blockchain.

The aim of Corda is to provide a platform with common services to ensure that any services built on top are compatible between the network participants, whilst still fostering innovation and faster time to market as the underlying infrastructure would be accepted and understood by at least the founding firms.

"If we have one platform with lots of products on top, then we get something that's more like the internet, where we still get innovation but we can still communicate with each other." - David Rutter

Corda's code was open-sourced on November 30th, 2016, and may in the future be contributed to the Hyperledger project. Hyperledger is a cross-industry project led by the non-profit Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology by coming up with common standards.

The consortium started on September 15, 2015 with nine financial companies:Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan,Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, and UBS.

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