R3 Member Banks Test Securities Trading on 5 Different Blockchain Platforms

The biggest fintech consortium in the world R3CEV, announced today the successful completion of an extensive trial of various blockchain systems in the trading of short-term fixed income securities.

Fourty financial institutions interfaced with private R3 blockchain systems that were built on top of five different distributed ledger protocols: Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel. The trial allowed banks to experiment with the issuance, trading and redemption of commercial paper securities via smart contracts on each platform, in order to ascertain the strengths and limitations of each one.

“Each of the distributed ledgers ran a smart contract based on identical business logic to enable the banks to accurately compare the difference in performance between them.”

The trials were conducted on three different cloud computing platforms, which hosted the different blockchain implementations: Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon AWS.

David Rutter, CEO of R3CEV, hailed the success of the trials and stated how critical it was for financial institutions to band together and bring this innovative technology into the financial system.

He said in the press release:

“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.”

Rutter went on to compare the potential of the blockchain to the revolution that swept across financial markets decades ago with the advent of electronic trading.

According to a WSJ report, Tim Grant, Managing Director at R3, mentioned that not all blockchain platforms that were used in the trials have the same set of smart contract features, and that it is a challenge to compare them, “It’s not clear there’s a well-defined playbook in how to evaluate these technologies side by side. We want to help bring that clarity,” said Grant.

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