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The news this week that R3 and IBM are working together raised eyebrows, as each entity has been on different sides and competing since the early days of enterprise blockchain.
From next month, the commercial version of Corda (the version big banks and the like are paying R3 for) will be made available via IBM’s LinuxOne servers, offering a hybrid of on-premise and cloud offerings. R3 announced the news at its annual developer conference, CordaCon.
Blockchain tribalism – R3’s Cord competes with Hyperledger Fabric, the corporate blockchain heavily backed by IBM – has been sidelined in favor of commercial sense, it seems. IBM’s LinuxOne business is much bigger than its nascent concern for blockchain, while many large banks that have vendor relationships with IBM use Corda.
“This started an interesting conversation at IBM, where LinuxOne came to us and said they wanted to work with us,” R3 chief executive Charley Cooper said in an interview. “If you are a highly complex and heavily regulated industry and you want the best technology, but you want name brands to be brought to your risk manager to say,” Trust us, we are choosing the best suppliers, “now they” best of both worlds. “
Disconnected contender
The corporate blockchain space, which attempts to adapt Bitcoin’s distributed ledger technology within the private settings of large corporations, has evolved into three widely separate fields: R3 Corda, Hyperledger, and corporate variants of Ethereum such as Quorum.
There has been a crossover between these tribes. IBM, for example, has also experimented with other DLTs such as Hedera Hashgraph and also with the Stellar blockchain, but the vast majority of Big Blue’s blockchain efforts focus on Hyperledger Fabric, which is the foundation of the IBM Blockchain platform.
“While there is a kind of tribalism within the blockchain community, it is not so in the broader tech community,” Cooper said. “They are not tribal, they want to see if they can deliver to customers. And if they can, the flavor of the blockchain is not a problem for them. ”
R3, while also being a Hyperledger member, is known to be a scrappy contender when it comes to closing business transactions.
New era
Times have changed, said Jonathan Levi, CEO of HACERA, one of the original engineers working on Hyperledger. The market is moving very fast and these business networks are specializing, he said.
“R3’s decision to leave the table and build their ecosystem on a framework has helped them move much faster,” Levi said, referring to early days with IBM, Intel, Cisco, R3, Digital Asset and others. around the engineering board in 2016.
“This is a great time for our R3 friends and the Corda ecosystem, and for some of the IBM customers who rely on mainframes,” he added. “I believe we will see more multi-party systems that are based on open standards and will provide more optionality and security by involving more suppliers.”
Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf said IBM’s service unit offering support for the R3 product is no different from its support for Oracle databases or Microsoft operating systems.
“This is yet another example of what we have been saying from the start, which is that the enterprise blockchain space is really large and will continue to be served by more than one protocol,” Behlendorf told CoinDesk via email.
There is support for Corda in four different Hyperledger projects, Behlendorf said, specifically pointing to Hyperledger’s interoperability level, Cactus, which offers an integration toolkit between Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, Quorum, and Hyperledger Besu-based networks.
“Congratulations to R3 on their continued commercial success, it helps all of us in the corporate blockchain space,” Behlendorf said.
