R3 CEV, today announced the successful completion of its ground breaking distributed ledger experiment
Involving eleven of the world’s largest financial institutions; BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo each connected on an R3-managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger, which was underpinned by Ethereum technology. Hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform offering Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), in an accelerated development environment.
Participants were able to explore its potential to execute financial transactions instantaneously across the global private network. The banks simulated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger without the need for a centralized third party. This represents a major step forward for the application of distributed ledger technology across the entire industry.
This collaborative experiment is the first in a series of projects, using a range of candidate distributed ledger technologies, and is designed to prove suitability of distributed ledgers for financial markets use cases.
R3 will be announcing a series of additional projects over the course of 2016. David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented: “The transition from vision and hypothesis to application and execution signifies the next major step towards using this technology to transform how institutions interact, report and trade with each other in financial markets. This is a very exciting development, both for R3 and our member banks, as well as the global financial services industry as a whole.”
Since launching its distributed ledger consortium in September last year, R3 has been running industry collaborative joint working groups with its 42 member banks to design and deploy advanced shared ledger technology for the global financial sector, incorporating multiple open source technologies and standards.
