R3 has completed trials of five new cloud-based blockchain technologies, with 40 financial institutions taking part.
The tests involved trading fixed-income assets between participants using blockchain technology. Run in parallel, the five different trials used smart contracts based on identical business logic to allow for accurate comparison.
Trials used various cloud technology providers and were conducted within R3s Global Collaborative Lab.
Banks connected to private distributed ledger technology and evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each. They would run smart contracts to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemptions, testing commercial papers – short-term fixed-income securities usually issued by corporations for fund raising.
The R3 lab is a centre specialising in testing collaborative blockchain developments, in order to explore the ways in which distributed ledger technology can be used in global financial markets.
CEO of R3 David Rutter said: “This development further supports R3's belief that close collaboration among global financial institutions and technology providers will create significant momentum behind the adoption of distributed ledger solutions across the industry.”
“These technologies represent a new frontier of innovation and will dramatically improve the way the financial services industry operates, in much the same way as the advent of electronic trading decades ago delivered huge advancements in efficiency, transparency, scalability and security.”
Tim Grant, managing director and global head of the R3 Collaborative Lab, added: “With the completion of this trial we have raised the bar significantly with the sheer number of global financial institutions, distributed ledger technologies and cloud providers working together in parallel to demonstrate how this nascent technology can be applied to real-world financial markets processes by deploying smart contracts on an actively traded asset class.”
“This represents great momentum for the R3 consortium and the technology providers and supports our aim to move distributed ledger technology from vision to execution.”
Participants in the trial included Bank of America, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Wells Fargo and HSBC.
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