R3 Corda, It's a Blockchain?

Corda is a distributed ledger platform specially designed for the financial sector. It is an open-source platform that can be used to build apps for financial institutions on top of it. It is a permissioned private network designed to record, manage and synchronize contracts and other shared data between partners. Corda is governed by the R3 consortium which is a collaboration of 70+ finance institutions. According to R3, Corda is a distributed ledger technology and isn’t a blockchain. In fact, R3 provides a platform for developing and deploying distributed apps for different financial use cases. The distributed apps created with Corda are known as CorDapps. DemoBench is a standalone desktop application provided by Corda to configure and launch local Corda nodes. It is a useful tool for training sessions and the development of CorDapps.

Corda has many similarities as well as differences with many existing blockchain/distributed ledger technologies. Corda allows the creation of immutable records for financial events. But unlike other blockchains, the transactions are done privately in Corda. Corda smart contracts can be written in Java or any other JVM language like kotlin (a java derived language).

And most importantly, Corda is not tied to any particular consensus algorithm and it doesn’t have its own cryptocurrency. It uses the “Notary” infrastructure for ‘sequencing of transactions’ and validating the transactions. And it does not broadcast a transaction globally for validation purposes. A Corda network may have multiple ‘Notaries’ and they validate the transactions using different algorithms.

The ultimate objective of Corda is to remove costly friction in business transactions by avoiding business intermediaries. Since it is only focusing on the finance domain, its architecture is simple than that of Ethereum or Fabric. This approach gives a performance and security advantage for Corda over other enterprise-level blockchain frameworks. Like many other distributed technologies, Corda is also in its infant stage and it is hard to conclude its prospects.