Barclays Demos R3’s Corda Distributed Ledger at London Event

At an event in London today to celebrate the graduation of its new startup accelerator class, Barclays demonstrated a smart contract platform built on Corda, the recently unveiled distributed ledger project from global banking consortium R3.

Calling the demo "history in the making", Dr Lee Braine of the Investment Bank CTO Office at Barclays said distributed ledgers constitute an "elegant way" to solve issues with legal agreements in the financial sector, a problem that has been labeled a point of focus for the Corda project by its creators.

According to International Business Times, Braine showcased a prototype of an investment banking application showing the lifecycle of an interest rate swap.

Braine was quoted as saying:

"I emphasise to you that legal documentation processes can be lengthy, cumbersome and manual. Smart Contract Templates could simplify all of that and, because they are templates designed for reuse, they could drive the industry's adoption of standards that are legally enforceable."

Braine said that the prototype was the result of a collaboration between Barclays, R3, the University College London, standards organization ISDA, French banking group Société Générale and TechStars, Barclays’ partner on its FinTech accelerator.

Braine showed how distributed ledgers can allow multiple parties within the system to see the same set of documents, simulating how nodes would exchange such information.

A key feature of Corda on display, according to the news source, showcased how not all nodes shared the information on the ledger. This design mechanism has been pointed to as an efficiency for financial institutions when compared to public blockchains such as Ethereum and bitcoin in public remarks by R3.

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