Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that enterprise blockchain company R3 is in early discussions with representatives from Ava Labs (an Avalanche company), Solana Foundation, and Adhara about a potential minority investment, joint venture, or outright sale of the company. Reported that he went. R3’s Corda DLT is one of the most widely used enterprise blockchains. The company declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.
R3 has a list of high-profile backers, including several systemically important banks. They include HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, ING and Itau Unibanco, among the 40 companies that participated in a $107 million funding round in 2017. There is. The following year, it raised another $5 million from its foreign exchange central counterparty, CLS. Although it has not announced any formal funding rounds since then, the company received a huge windfall in 2019 from the XRP crypto token, estimated at around $240 million.
R3 has an agreement with Ripple to promote Ripple to R3’s banking customers. As payment, I received an option via XRP tokens. The two companies had a conflict over the deal, but ultimately reached a settlement. The size of the settlement was not made public, but the value of the XRP involved is estimated to be at least $240 million.
Meanwhile, a year ago, R3 confirmed a series of job cuts. Further team changes have occurred over the past few months, including the departure of several senior employees. Founding CTO Richard Gendal-Brown currently only works part-time at the company. “He will continue to serve as R3’s representative as well as play a vital advisory role to the CEO and R3 steering committee,” a spokesperson told Ledger Insights.
One of the largest enterprise blockchains
The company’s Corda DLT is one of the most widely used permissioned blockchains in the institutional sector with over 60 live solutions. These include SIX Digital Exchange, which hosts the Swiss National Bank’s wholesale CBDC, Euroclear’s D-FMI tokenization platform, and collateral mobility company HQLAᵡ. Collateral companies include BNP Paribas, Deutsche Börse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan and UBS.
Another example is the Japanese Progmat security token platform founded by MUFG. MUFG’s investors include NTT Data, SMBC, Mizuho, and SBI. NTT Data is also involved in another high-profile initiative. ABI Lab, the Italian banking association, helped develop Spunta, which is used by about 100 banks for nightly interbank reconciliation.
Bloomberg reported that parts of the high-profile Corda project have been terminated. While that is true, the same is true for all major blockchains, both permissioned and permissionless. That is the essence of innovation.
In its early years, Corda implemented two major projects in each area and made significant progress in the areas of insurance and trade finance. Insurance consortium B3i shut down in 2022, and the institute’s RiskStream insurance blockchain initiative separated from Corda after failing to raise a large funding round. Two major trade finance joint ventures, Marco Polo and Contour, closed last year.
The lure of permissionless blockchains
The appeal of cryptocurrencies and public blockchains has led some companies to hedge their risks by adopting Ethereum-compatible Hyperledger Bethesque. Hyperledger Beth can be used as a permissioned enterprise blockchain or on the permissionless Ethereum network. The downside is that Besu’s privacy is weak compared to other enterprise blockchains, especially Corda and Canton. For example, Brazil’s CBDC project DREX adopted Besu, but has been delayed while the central bank continues to analyze the development progress of the privacy solution.
Meanwhile, sources told Ledger Insights that the London Stock Exchange has switched its preferred technology from Corda to Besu. However, the stock exchange has not yet launched a production DLT project.
In the future, blockchain networks may become more open, but some applications will remain on permissioned blockchains. Client-side applications are likely to exist on a permissionless chain, often including a layer of permissions within the token’s smart contract.
In a sign of convergence, some layer 2 public blockchains are inherently permissioned chains. Certain public chains, including Avalanche, support permitted subnetworks.
Despite this news, R3 continues to win major new projects. For example, the company was recently selected as one of the key technology providers for the Regulated Liability Network (RLN), a tokenization collaboration led by UK Finance and involving major UK banks. RLN is one of many projects that make up the current institutional push to introduce tokenization in traditional financial markets.
