Mike Hearn & Richard Gendal Brown: Corda – A Distributed Ledger for Financial Services

Attracting over 70 of the world’s biggest financial institutions to its consortium in just over a year, R3 has accomplished a formidable task. Aiming to rethink the fabric of the financial system, they first conducted experiments testing blockchain platforms for their member and last year began developing their own distributed ledger platform: Corda.

The effort to build Corda was lead by R3 CTO Richard Brown and the former Bitcoin developer and R3 lead architect Mike Hearn. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered the vision of the project and why it represents a radical departure from existing blockchain platforms.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The origin story of R3
• Why existing blockchain designs didn’t meet their needs
• How the R3 team lead a design effort to develop a new platform from scratch
• The business problem Corda is aiming to solve
• The components of Corda’s architecture
• How Corda handles privacy
• Notaries and preventing double spends
• Open sourcing Corda and the plan to join Hyperledger

Episode links:

• R3 Corda: What Makes it Different
• Introducing R3 Corda: A Distributed Ledger for Financial Services
• Corda: An Introduction [PDF]
• R3 Website
• E151 - Ian Grigg: Ricardian Contracts and Digital Assets Prehistory
• Smart Contract Templates: Foundations, Design Landscape & Research Directions

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/155