Financial technology innovation company R3 CEV today announces the successful completion of a distributed ledger experiment involving 11 of the world’s leading financial institutions.
R3 and consortium member banks Barclays PLC (LON:BARC), BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC Holdings plc (LON:HSBA), Natixis SA (EPA:KN), Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc (LON:RBS), TD Bank, UBS AG (SWX:UBSN), UniCredit SpA (BIT:UCG) and Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC) connected on an R3-managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger. The latter was supported by Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform offering Blockchain as a Service (BaaS).
Participants in the experiment got the opportunity to explore the technology’s 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.
The experiment – which was curated in the R3 Global Collaborative Labs (GCL) environment – marks an important milestone in the collaboration for the R3 consortium and a major step forward for the application of distributed ledger technology across the entire industry.
This collaborative experiment is the first in a set 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 borne out of its collaborative lab workshops during 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 the launch of its distributed ledger consortium in September 2015, R3 has been running industry collaborative joint working groups with its 42 member banks to design and deploy advanced shared ledger technology in the global financial sector, incorporating multiple open source technologies and standards.
You can view the official announcement from R3 by clicking here.