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Blockchain Platform Developed by Banks To Be Open-Source (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the affinity-for-open-source dept.

A blockchain platform developed by a group that includes more than 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions is making its code publicly available, in what could become the industry standard for the nascent technology, reports Reuters. From the article: The Corda platform has been developed by a consortium brought together by New-York-based financial technology company R3. It represents the biggest shared effort among banks, insurers, fund managers and other players to work on using blockchain technology in the financial markets. Blockchain, which originated in the digital currency bitcoin, works as a web-based transaction-processing and settlement system. It creates a "golden record" of any given set of data that is automatically replicated for all parties in a secure network, eliminating any need for third-party verification. Banks reckon the technology could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent. They are racing to build products using the technology that will generate new revenue, with dozens of patent applications filed for blockchain-based products by Wall Street's top lenders. R3 says it hopes its platform will become the industry standard, although its intention is indeed for firms to build products on top of it.

32 comments

  1. life imitating pardoy by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    they've developed eCoin

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    1. Re:life imitating pardoy by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If this is the same banks who are clearly storing my password rather than hashing it (Tell us the 3rd 5th & 9th character of your password), who wont let me use a password that is more than 12 characters long or contains !"£$%^&*(()-=_+;:@'#~ characters? They will break anything secure about blockchain by trying to make it look more secure to morons!

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  2. Its not open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Until you release the code. Until then quit claiming something your not providing

    1. Re:Its not open source by DickBreath · · Score: 2

      It's also patented. But they want it to be industry standard? Aren't those two at odds with one another? Making it both open source and industry standard would be a better combination.

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      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    2. Re:Its not open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LDAP is patented and it is the industry standard communication protocol for directory services.

    3. Re:Its not open source by mccrew · · Score: 2

      It's actually pretty common. If you build a phone that is compatible with 3G, 4G standards, then be ready to whip out your checkbook for industry groups like Broadcom who will come a-knocking with their hand out looking for patent royalty payments.

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    4. Re:Its not open source by darkain · · Score: 2

      XML is patented by Microsoft! Look how far that technology went.

    5. Re: Its not open source by WarJolt · · Score: 2

      Yes, but xml actually served a need. Bank controlled blockchains don't serve a need. Banks establish trust by being a fucking Bank. Bitcoin needs a proof of work function to establish trust. A blockchain with a backdoor still depends on the original trust of the bank. If you can trust a bank why do you need a blockchain. If you can't trust a bank then the backdoor they build into the blockchain isn't going to make me trust it anymore.

    6. Re:Its not open source by Shatrat · · Score: 3, Informative

      Most industry standards I know are patented to hell and back. About 30% of every smartphone's cost is from patent royalties. If the patent is on some good technology, other companies will pay the royalty. Not all IP is rounded corner bullshit.
      http://www.androidauthority.co...

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    7. Re:Its not open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      About 30% of every smartphone's manufacturing cost is from patent royalties.

      FTFY. Manufacturers are the ones that pay patent royalties, not retail purchasers - although the cost gets passed on. About 70% of a smartphone's retail cost is markup in the distribution and retail channels.

    8. Re:Its not open source by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      The win is in transaction fees. Then add in a layer for gov tracking.
      All the US currency transaction reporting, suspicious activity reports, monetary instrument logs and structuring tracking gets coded in.

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      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    9. Re: Its not open source by just+another+AC · · Score: 1

      Banks establish trust by being a fucking Bank.

      And they lost most of that with the GFC (yes I am including the finance industry in the term "Banks" because they are a home for our money too)

  3. Follow the money by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Blockchain? Open-source? Kind of like Bitcoin : sounds good eh?

    Remember this: whatever banks concoct and why they decide to do it isn't for the good of their customers, but that of their rich fuck shareholders. Yes, that's the same rich fucks who caused the latest recession - and the one before that, and the one before that...

    Still want in on their latest project? I don't...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Follow the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right on, I wonder if those rent seeking vampire assholes build the skim right into the protocol.

  4. Again: The blockchain is not the innovative part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Blockchains have existed long before they got public attention with Bitcoin. The innovative part of Bitcoin is not the blockchain. It's the way Bitcoin users agree on the correct chain and reject fraudulent chains without a central authority.

  5. That's nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nobody should touch this with a 10 foot pole.

  6. Blockchain did NOT originate with bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Blockchain did NOT originate with bitcoin. You know what seems to have used it first in a widespread way? Git.

    Every git commit is hashed with a link to the previous commit. The result is a 'hash chain' of snapshots, complete with merkle trees. The difference is that git's hashes are not required to be below a certain value. This is the same as saying that as a cryptocurrency, git's 'difficulty' is permanently set at 0.

    -- sea

     

    1. Re:Blockchain did NOT originate with bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      bitcoin pre-dates git. Linux Torvaldes has even said that he wrote git after reading a paper on bitcoin internals and realizing that it could apply to a content-addressable filesystem.

    2. Re:Blockchain did NOT originate with bitcoin by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      WTF? what does git have to do with blockchains? You are confused. git is a Merkle Tree, not a blockchain

    3. Re:Blockchain did NOT originate with bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      Long before Bitcoin, blockchains have been used in "eternal log files", "digital notaries" and "timestamping service" for at least 20 years. Torvald's first name is Linus.

  7. Can anyone please explain by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    What the big deal with blockchain is? To me it just looks like a way to offload the bank's settlement network, but who's gonna wait 15 minutes while the distributed DB syncs?

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    1. Re:Can anyone please explain by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      15 minutes? That would be an infinite improvement over the current settlement system response time.

    2. Re:Can anyone please explain by darkain · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The big deal is about big transactions. This most likely isn't going to be used in the consumer credit card / debit card market, but more likely in the large purchase department. Buying a car/house? Waiting a few minutes vs hours/days for credit reports to return. Transferring millions/billions of dollars between accounts, who's auditing it? Blockchains significantly reduce the amount of work in this department while essentially eliminating fraud, since the dollars can be tracked from transaction to transaction.

    3. Re:Can anyone please explain by myowntrueself · · Score: 1

      15 minutes? That would be an infinite improvement over the current settlement system response time.

      If 15 minutes is an infinite improvement over some other time then surely that other time must be converging on infinite?

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    4. Re:Can anyone please explain by xenog · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have written Haskoin, a Haskell implementation of the Bitcoin protocol. I have consulted for a large bank and various interested organizations on "blockchain" technology. There is really nothing to see here. Bankers are scared of Bitcoin. They're trying to get some of the attention and changing the tune to that of "blockchain". Some of them believe (or lead others to believe) that they can do something with this blockchain technology, but virtually nobody understand how any of it works. My opinion is that bankers are very specialized salesmen who know about making deals. Bitcoin to them is just a bunch of startups working with blockchain technology, which is treated as some generic buzzword that they can attach to some of their offerings if they just use some setup that has some passing resemblance to the Bitcoin system. It is all very weird, like having a horse attached to a contraption involving pedals on a four-wheeled vehicle and call it a car. In all my time doing consulting around this blockchain stuff I did not find one use case that merited the use of anything remotely resembling Bitcoin. Banks rely on secrecy, identity, and they have to respect lots of different regulations and restrictions, also their software needs to change very often. An open database on the Internet for everyone to see running on very basic stable software is not going to fly for any of their requirements. Blockchains in banks are an oxymoron.

    5. Re:Can anyone please explain by slew · · Score: 3, Informative

      The big deal is about big transactions. This most likely isn't going to be used in the consumer credit card / debit card market, but more likely in the large purchase department. Buying a car/house? Waiting a few minutes vs hours/days for credit reports to return. Transferring millions/billions of dollars between accounts, who's auditing it? Blockchains significantly reduce the amount of work in this department while essentially eliminating fraud, since the dollars can be tracked from transaction to transaction.

      Actually, this technology is targeted a contractual transactions in the financial realm (think bank cash claims, credit default-swaps, derivative securities that rely on precise timing, etc.). As far as I can tell, there no concept of proof-of-work or mining, but it's purely a distributed financial ledger concept for banks to use. The block chain concept and the chain history being held simultaneously held by multiple partner institutions simply makes the ledger un-eraseable (any corrections need to be recorded by future transactions, not erased). Unlike bit-coin, there isn't intended to be a single global ledger of all transactions everywhere, but a ledger per domain.

  8. How in gods name will this work?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hasn't the Bitcoin Blockchain reached several gigabytes in size now?
    Don't transactions take a while to propagate around the network?

    Are the days of instant transactions numbered?
    This one trick has banks running for the hills.
    Click this to find out more!

  9. "double-secret banking open source" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This can only end in frustrations on all sides.

  10. Patently obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "with dozens of patent applications filed for blockchain-based products by Wall Street's top lenders"

    I thought software patents weren't allowed in the US any more?

  11. Corda Demo from Barclays and Concord Information by whh3 · · Score: 1

    Here is some information about a demo that Barclays gave of Corda:

    http://www.coindesk.com/r3-corda-demo-barclays-distributed-ledger/

    It would appear that the banking consortium R3 is going to build a platform on top of Corda. They are going to name that platform Concord and the WSJ has an interesting blog post about how it all works together:

    http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/08/24/a-closer-look-at-r3s-concord/

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  12. Bad news for ETH by Jah+Shaka · · Score: 0

    This looks lik eba news for Etherium and ETH - as the banks were their main market and backers ? Makes ETC look like a better long term opportunity now...