Attracting over 70 of the world’s biggest financial institutions to its consortium in just over a year, R3 has accomplished a formidable task. Aiming to rethink the fabric of the financial system, they first conducted experiments testing blockchain platforms for their member and last year began developing their own distributed ledger platform: Corda.
The effort to build Corda was lead by R3 CTO Richard Brown and the former Bitcoin developer and R3 lead architect Mike Hearn. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered the vision of the project and why it represents a radical departure from existing blockchain platforms.
Topics covered in this episode:

The origin story of R3
Why existing blockchain designs didn’t meet their needs
How the R3 team lead a design effort to develop a new platform from scratch
The business problem Corda is aiming to solve
The components of Corda’s architecture
How Corda handles privacy
Notaries and preventing double spends
Open sourcing Corda and the plan to join Hyperledger

Episode links:

R3 Corda: What Makes it Different
Introducing R3 Corda: A Distributed Ledger for Financial Services
Corda: An Introduction [PDF]
R3 Website
E151 - Ian Grigg: Ricardian Contracts and Digital Assets Prehistory
Smart Contract Templates: Foundations, Design Landscape & Research Directions

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/155