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Twitter : @Psilocybe____
PsilocybeRBBC: Red Belly Network
27/5/2022 Artist: stuz0r The notorious, white-belly, poisonous Psilocybe"You call that a blockchain? This is a blockchain" Crocodile GramoliContentsTeam The Tech Slithering through the undergrowth With that considered what will RBBC do? Risk I have looked at the tech but I have mainly focussed on the connections with which RBBC’s team are involved in as well as the wider frame work it sits within. “Slithering through the undergrowth” meanders through the network that RBBC is within, accompani...
Psilocybe0L Network: A Short History of Crypto
This is a tea. A special tea. 11.2023WELCOMETake a seat, let me roll out the TV. This is a documentary, where you read and imagine Psilocybe going through some crypto history. I am going to touch on ETH, Aptos, Solana, contracts, venture capital and most importantly 0L Network. 0L Network is a fork of Diem. Remember those days of Diem and Libra? It has been quietly in construction since those days and is, well, I will let you find out. Get cosy.Start here…Humans came out of the tree and it ha...
PsilocybeTEN : Obscuro Reloaded
The Encrypted Network | The Confidential Roll-Up 15/10/2024 Contents:WelcomePartial Cloud over Liberty StreetGather around the tableCordaIntel + ConclaveDeFITENStepping StonesScaling MountainsBridgeR3 NetworkWelcomeIf you like roots, if you like context, if you like a bit more meat in your burger, this is a longer read up on what was once a protocol called Obscuro. Now, reloaded, The Encrypted Network, more commonly known as TEN. After you…Partial cloud over Liberty StreetUnder the partially ...
Twitter : @Psilocybe____
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3/8/2022
Psilosybe?… p’Silocbey?…. Can I just call you Gary?
Editors note: back when I made this write-up I was in the throes of a bureaucratic battle with my internet provider as I had just moved. It was a long, arduous, dull saga that was finally resolved. However, during it meant I had no internet and I had to utilise my friends WiFi when I had a chance leading to incomplete work. It does still provide a decent amount of intel for you but there are missing bits and parts I wished to continue to build upon. I do have intention to make another piece on Obscuro and R3.
The purpose of this is to assist any research you may conduct on R3 and Obscuro.
I have divided it into two parts. Part 1 is if you would like to have a quick read, skim over the run up to Obscuro. If you have the time then Part 2 is an extrapolation and provides some more detail.
R3 are a first-mover in the DLT/Blockchain space.
R3 was initially called the Distributed Ledger Group (DLG). David E. Rutter, one of the founders of R3 and with a history of banking technology behind him, saw two things, 1) the banks and financial institutions were poor at co-operating thus they were silo-ing their advances on payment systems and 2) Rutter saw the benefits DLT had for payment systems. Rutter, Todd McDonald and Jesse Edwards started DLG and spoke with 8 banks in 2014 about co-operating and developing the next generation of payment systems or risk getting left behind.
By the end of 2015, this consortium grew to 42 banks (see picture below) and there was a name change to R3 CEV – the CEV was dropped. R3 is in reference to the 3 founders and R being Rutter’s first initial of his last name. Jesse Edwards would end up leaving R3 due to strategy of the investment arm of R3; Edwards wanted to pursue a private wing that was outside of the firm whilst McDonald and Rutter wanted to keep it in-house.
In 2017, R3 raised the highest fund round for DLT at that point, totalling around $107mm. R3 have some of the best engineering talent with banking bank grounds, with the collaboration of the financial institutions, R3 has worked closely with regulators and continue to do so. They provide for clients needs on individual projects but R3’s main products are the Corda Network and Conclave.
Corda Network is an internet of Corda nodes. It is an operating system rather than a bespoke service. It is a private, permissioned shared-ledger. It has a regulatory node, through which data can be pushed to or pulled by the regulator. The Corda Foundation was established in the Netherlands and this makes sure that bad things won’t happen.
This foundation is the Governance Body of Corda. It is set up in the Netherlands. It has no shareholders and cannot distribute a dividend, it cannot make a profit. It has a board of directors, 11 seats. The directors are nominated by people and elected by participants. The population votes for the board and the board makes the decisions.
R3 have huge clients. Two name two. SDX and BSN. What is an SDX and a BSN? Dodgy sex moves? No. Swiss Digital Exchange and Blockchain-based Service Network.
BSN was launched in April 2020. It is led by the Blockchain Service Network Development Association (BSN Development Association) who are responsible for development, operations and maintenance of the BSN, this includes the SIC (Chinese state State Information Centre), UnionPay – which is the largest bank card organisation in the world - as well as companies from China’s finance, software and telecoms sector.
It is a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network used to deploy and operate all types of blockchain applications. The intention of the BSN is to provide fast blockchain tech that is adopted across the world that is, most importantly, led by Chinese entities.
SDX is run by the SIX group who run the Swiss financial infrastructure and they bought the BME, essentially a group that runs the Spanish stock exchange. In May 2022 alone, 109.4 bn CHF (roughly 113.67bn USD) was exchanged. Being Swiss-based, SIX work with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) who themselves are keen to install CBDCs, this has naturally brought R3, BIS, and SDX into collaboration.
To summarise just those two clients alone, R3 are positioned with financial centres of the world, assisting with infrastructure of the financial institutions, one is a Taiwan-hating superpower, the other a neutral-loving place with the oldest financial institution in the world.
Corda has produced an avid community of users, Cordite is a consequence. Cordite is independent from R3, it is users who have been attempting to bring Defi to Corda. Significant positions of Cordite are held by RBS employees, Richard Crook worked for RBS, became the Director for Cordite. Lo and behold, the FCA, RBS and Cordite developed a mortgage transaction app in 2017.
To Conclave. Conclave came later and this shields data in order to keep commerce secure. Then funny enough, not long after Conclave was produced, R3 announced they were working on project Obscuro in the summer of 2021. At Corda Con 2021, James Carlyle gave a brief talk on Obscuro, highlighting the growth of Defi and the necessity of privacy on transactions in order to stop fronting-running (MEV). Front running in early 2021 was valued at $1.4bn. As of May 2021, the total value of cryptocurrency traded across decentralized exchanges (DEXes) has reached more than $58 billion.
After a while of incubation Obscuro moved out of the parents’ house. The reasoning being R3 is based in the regulated space, for Obscuro, the culture, tech and target market are different to the enterprise space that Corda operates in, so it is appropriate to take this away from R3 as a separate project. In turn, the success of Obscuro could well drive interest back towards R3’s Conclave.
The closest comparison on the market is Cosmos’ Secret Network, it utilises the TEE technology. As of August 2022, it has a market cap of $190mm. Now, the real value is with Ethereum and we are familiar with the market caps of Layer 2’s but just to bring it to the conscious thought: Optimism is around $375mm, Metis $145mm, and there is the Polygon in the corner standing at a modest $6.8bn.
James Carlyle see’s defi bifurcating, there will be the dominant regulated space and then the other side of it, evoking images of the wild west. Obscuro is positioning itself towards the regulated side of that space and being a first-mover with a history of working with regulators it is primed for success.
2014. founded. Originally called R3 CEV. R comes from the CEO’s first initial of their last name, and the 3 stands for the original 3 founders. CEV stood for “Consulting”, “Exchange”, “Venture”.
There is a roundtable of 8 banks to discuss and educate on the benefits of blockchain.
2015. 9 banks form the partnership that is R3 – Barclays, BBVA, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Commonwealth Bank, Credit Suisse, State Street, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland – as well as DRW, Align Commerce, Perkins Coie, Boost VC, and Fintech Collective. This later grows 42 founding members of the consortium in 3 months, this included Stanford, Andreessen Horowitz, Xapo, BitGo, Chain, Ripple and Mirror.
Later in 2015, Hyperledger, the Bank of England, Align Commerce, and Blockstock attended the third and final roundtable hosted in NYC.
Initial press releases of the consortium came under the name DLG (Distributed Ledger Group).
Richard Brown led the development and in October 2015, James Carlyle (Chief Engineer) and Mike Hearn (Lead Platform Engineer) joined the development team.
2016. April 5th, Corda is first publicly explained. Richard Brown explicitly said that Corda was a DLT not a blockchain. November, CEV is chopped from the name.
In 2016, Bank of Canada (BOC) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) embarked on Project Jasper and Project Ubin, respectively, to explore the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the clearing and settlement of payments and securities. JP Morgan and Accenture helped with the experiment. Canada utilised Corda and Singapore utilised Quorum.
2017. R3 raises largest fund - $107mm – for DLT tech at the time. It splits into two groups; Corda platform as well as the Lab and Research Centre.
International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA) joins the Corda Network.
2018. Corda Enterprises. Ecosystem reaches 300.
R3, TradeIX (Marco Polo Network) and the participating banks - Bangkok Bank, Barclays, BBVA, Bladex, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, CTBC Bank, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, Shinhan Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo - begin developing an end-to-end open account trade finance business network powered by TradeIX (Marco Polo Network) and R3’s Corda distributed ledger platform.
2019. Corda Enterprise 4 GA.
Wells Fargo use Corda for internal transfers of their digital cash, which is more flexible in availability for settlements than SWIFT.
LAB577 release DASL and BCB utilise it to bring crypto to Corda, more importantly, cash to ledger.
R3 and Marco Polo Network conduct a few trials, all are successful. Company included Daimler AG, Dürr AG, Alfa-Bank, Novolipetsk Steel Company, Commerzbank and Vesuvius GmbH along with BNY Mellon joining MPN.
2021. Conclave launches.
July, Mobifi announce they completed the first bridge protocol that allows coins to be swapped between the Corda network and the Ethereum blockchain as well as a mobile app to conduct the swap. Intention is to bridge Corda with other chains such as Polygon.
September 2021, R3 announced they had a project in DeFi called Obscuro with James Carlyle conducting a talk at Corda Con 2021.
In June 2021, Project Jura saw Banque de France, BIS, and the Swiss National Bank use wholesale CBDC’s on SDX platform, which runs on Corda, with Natixis, which is an administrator. Corda’s privacy designed proved to BIS et al that the application has low energy consumption, comparable to conventional database applications. The SIC and TARGET2 systems were used to underpin the real value of the CHF and EUR involved with the wCBDCs. SDX, with FINMA authorisation and provided the test environment. The Digital Asset Registry (DAR) records holdings and transfer, Natixis is a registrar of DAR and provided the gateway to the SDX platform.
BIS’s Project Dunbar launches, BIS worked with R3’s Corda and also used Partior – this is built on Quorum. The prototypes that have been come from these systems were made with the intention to test interoperability and a shared platform for banks to make international settlements with multiple CBDCs, probing the question whether DLT technology can help progress wholesale payments between banks. Led by the Singapore-wing of the BIS Innovation Hub, the institutions involved were the Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank Negara Malaysia, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and South African Reserve Bank.
These experiments prove there is more financial stability with CBDC platform in the sense commercial banks have direct access to them rather than relying on correspondent banks, central bank money is only available via settlement accounts to certain banks; there is faster completion and operating windows are far wider than the current system; and diversity of asset availability can lead to competition.
They are a step forward but still relatively limited in the number of countries involved compared to the end goal of global cross-border payments.
David E. Rutter – CEO, Founder.
In money markets from 1984, ten years later, he started electronic trading with his joint-venture firm, Chicago Board Brokerage, launched an e-trading platform for US Treasuries. For another ten years, he was at ICAP PLC as the CEO of Electronic Broking – the world’s largest interdealer broker - where he ran BrokerTec fixed income and EBS foreign exchange platforms.
Founded a collaboration model to solve industry level problem. Making the system more efficient as well as reaching more customers. To build a frictionless digital economy that reaches a wider audience, built by the established institutions within finance. Before, these institutions sought improvement to systems on their own accord, leading to a silo effect in innovation, however, through collaboration they are more likely to succeed to creating the cost-effective change for high-level finance they are each seeking.
https://twitter.com/daviderutter1 https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviderutter/
Todd McDonald – Co-Founder of R3, CPO.
Worked for IBM, Standard Chartered Bank, as a Consultant on Emerging Markets, State Street, Barnes Brothers Unlimited and R3. He helped establish the GDF – Global Digital Finance. GDF brags having over 350 partnerships, which include R3 (of course), London Stock Exchange, SDX, BTI, Crypto Asset Lab, Crypto.com, EY, DTCC, ING, LCX, Standard Chartered, Qredo, Luno, DGEN….). He has served on the governing board of Hyperledger.
“We are excited for blockchain technology, in fact we are betting our careers on it… We feel that blockchain technology for financial services can drastically change how not only the banks and institutions do business but how customers interact with financial institutions… Now they can do more outside of the four walls of their institution in a shared service that is more secure and more efficient at a much lower cost.”
These are McDonald’s words from Corda Con –
“In 2016, when we were putting together the first business plan for R3, a few of us gave ourselves the assignment of a view ahead to 2030… the role of banks will shift to become service portals for both retail and corporate customers. Driven by consumer habits and strong examples in other industries see
“Software Eats The World”. Banks will need to embrace the world as a service provider within the respective monetary and sovereign zones or they will risk becoming more and more of a utility.
“CBDC will exist in some form, exacerbating the need for banks to move to the services model and users will have much less intermediate access to cash funding… We are still to see where the CBDC will come from but this is guaranteed to happen.
“What is value in this scenario? 24/7 access to all the dematerialised assets that a company or individual owns or controls. The definition of an asset will expand beyond todays conception as when more things can be safely, securely and efficiently dematerialised then more things can be assigned to have value. “Therefore, there will be an explosion in the number of agreements between actors this will lead to a need for a low-friction way for those agreements to both be managed and secured.
“Increasing the risk and complexity associated with that means that trust will reside somewhere and with stewards of trust that have expertise and a solid reputation. Yet, borders will not magically dissolve, this leads to having a trusted, federated network for assets obligations and agreements across countries or regions that has the proper regulatory bide for their respective monetary zones.
“This network will not only move assets but move and track agreements, which will have controlled visibility and potentially enforceability of obligations that relate to that agreement.”
https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvmcdonald/
Jesse Edwards – Co-founder, former CFO.
He was going to establish Adorc, an independent venture firm that would drive Corda adoption but Corda decided to go with an in-house venture arm to help with that goal. He had an investment banking background with Sandler O’Neill and AGC Partner, his Linked In is dormant and the last position it shows is co-founder of Liquidity Edge between 2015 – 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseledwards/
Richard Brown – CTO
This is some of the investors of R3.
Temasek - https://www.temasek.com.sg/en/index
Mizuho Capital
HSBC
Credit Suisse
Intel Capital
Barclays
CLS - https://www.cls-group.com/
ING
Sumitomo
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
BNP Paribas
Deutsche Bank
Ping An
The Royal Bank of Scotland
U.S. Bank
Societe Generale
There are many more clients and partnerships that are listed here.
Corda is R3’s enterprise blockchain platform and Conclave is R3’s confidential computing platform. Native applications to Corda are called CorDapps.
Corda - uses a novel consensus mechanism in which transactions are cryptographically linked but does not periodically batch multiple transactions into a block rather all transactions are processed in real-time.
Smart contracts in Corda can be written in Java or Kotlin. Corda also provides developer tools ranging from: Corda Network Builder, Network Bootstrapper, DemoBench, Node Explorer, Checkpoint Tooling.
Corda Network is an internet of Corda nodes.
Organisations tended to think about running an isolated Corda node. However, Carlyle and co went with the plan of organisations building their applications on top of the Corda Network, meaning the organisation does not have to build their own network and one that is isolated. What benefit does this bring?
In one word: interoperability. Having one Corda network rather than segregated networks makes the singular larger one more useful, it allows applications to mingle with other applications.
First transaction on Corda was a bond, they showed a bond could be exchanged with cash on Corda.
James Carlyle says, Corda is aiming to be this invisible technical network that apps exist on, likening it to the internet, a person may not understand how the internet operates but they will use it, they can rely on it working and applications are built on top of it.
Conclave – This is to shield data from public exposure. This keeps commerce secure and confidential.
BSN China – Blockchain-based Service Network launched in April 2020. It is led by the Blockchain Service Network Development Association (BSN Development Association) is responsible for development, operations and maintenance of the BSN, this includes the SIC (Chinese state State Information Centre) as well as companies from China’s finance, software and telecoms sector.
It is a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network used to deploy and operate all types of blockchain applications. The intention of the BSN is to provide fast blockchain tech that is adopted across the world that is, most importantly, led by Chinese entities.
It is adapted to Fabric, FISCO, BCOS, CITA, Xuperchain, Wutong Chain and Brochain, Corda, and the public blockchains Ethereum, EOS, Near, Solana, Algorand, Oasis, Polkadot, Nervos and more. Its technical partners include Daml, Dfuse, Industria and EOS foundation.
2022 August is the intended launch date for the Spartan Network. Spartan Network (SN) is China’s international service, open source and is supposedly free from Government observance. SN will operate on the US Dollar. BSN is working on a Universal Digital Payment Network that will integrate various CBDCs.
China are looking to carry out judicial activities on blockchain by 2025.
Insurwave – EY and blockchain company Guardtime have built a blockchain based maritime insurance platform built on Corda, creating an immutable database between shippers and insurers to allow for better risk assessments and quicker claims payouts.
Ledger Edge – May 2022, it became the first regulated corporate bond trading platform built using distributed ledger technology powered by Corda. Fully regulated by the FCA. It is a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF). David Nicol is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ledger Edge. Nicol was at IBM before becoming Product Manager at R3 from 2017 to 2020. March 2020 is when he co-founded Ledger Edge.
It has started in the UK before launching in the US then the EU MTF realm.
Ivno – In 2021, R3 acquired Ivno’s team and tech. Ivno developed a tokenisation software with fraud prevention and regulatory compliance at heart. It helps mint and manage stablecoins, tokenise any asset quickly, multi-asset management, and as it was deployed on R3’s Corda, it could work with blockchain and native apps on Corda. It was trailed on Corda in April 2021 and then new of R3 purchasing Ivno came out in October 2021.
SIX SDX – SIX (Swiss Infrastructure and Exchange) group operates the Swiss financial infrastructure. They have their own venture wing as well as running the SIX Digital Exchange. In 2020, SBI Digital Asset Holdings and SIX they will do a joint venture to produce the largest liquid hub for financial institutions in Singapore.
Tim Grant worked at R3 then SIX. At SIX he also joined the EEA. Then moved to Galaxy Digital.
SDX is a part of Chamber of Digital Commerce and GBBC (and IWA, Inter Work Alliance), OMFIF, WEF.
“The company is owned by 121 domestic and international financial institutions, which are also the main users of its services. The shares are distributed such that no single owner or type of bank has an absolute majority.”
BIS projects – Project Jura, Project Helvetia and Project Dunbar.
Project Ubin by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Project Jasper by the Bank of Canada.
Riksbank – piloted the e-Krona on the Corda system.
Bank of Kazakhstan – Digital Tenge project.
Accenture – often are present in projects with R3.
Marco Polo Network – This is a collaboration of R3 and TradeIX, an Irish-based tech firm. MPN is a trade finance network. They successfully completed the largest Blockchain Open Account Trade Finance Trial on R3's Corda platform.
TradeIX Limited carried on with its name but then officially changed it to Marco Polo Network. They provide blockchain solutions for supply-chains and trade finance.
MPN have strategic partnerships with Accenture, R3, Mastercard, Commerzbank, Microsoft to name a few. For something named Marco Polo Network, ironically, its bases are heavily centred in Western Europe with Asian bases in UAE and Singapore.
HSBC - HSBC conducted the first live trade finance transaction on the Corda platform in May 2018.
HSBlox – They launched with R3 Corda Healthcare Community. HSBlox released RevBlox on Corda. HSBlox has a background in healthcare, supply chain and fintech. They utilise machine learning and blockchain to provide real-time information and interventions. In 2018, Todd McDonald was brought onto the board of HSBlox. HSBlox went on to produce Digital Sample Manager (DSM) on Corda.
One Hypernet – Singapore-based project provides cross-border payments and foreign exchange to banks, payment providers and corporations. It does this by building on Corda and utilising Conclave. They work with R3 and Intel.
LAB577 – started up by former NatWest software engineers, Banker Richard Crook. Farzad Pezeshkpour,
Co-author software solutions for financial institutions in emerging technology.
577 made DASL (Digital Asset Shared Ledger). Richard Crook said Corda Network provides privacy, which is crucial to financial institutions. DASL provides liquidity to previous illiquid assets. With their partnership with BCB Group, ERC-20 tokens are able to flow onto the Corda Network, this allows projects to raise ICO’s and build on Corda.
BCB Group announced their purchase of LAB577 at the beginning of 2022.
BCB Group – Founded by Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, in his own words, BCB is a “business banking challenger”, it is the UK’s first and only financially regulated payment institution dedicated to the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, and the only dual-regulated group spanning UK and Switzerland.
The first financial institution combining business accounts, cryptocurrency markets and digital asset custody in one integrated solution, with a client list that includes the world's largest cryptocurrency venues including Galaxy Digital, Bitstamp, Bitpay. It provides business accounts and trading services in the digital asset economy. BCB Group’s executive team have worked for Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Investec, Lloyds Commercial Bank, Norton Rose Fulbright, FIS and Sun Life of Canada. Aiming to provide end-to-end integrated infrastructure covering payments, trading and custody.
January 2022, BCB raised $60mm in a Series A round of funding, the largest in the UK blockchain industry. Bought LAB577 in 2022.
BCB want to bring Crypto to Corda. They use DASL to provide integration of fiat banking and crypto ledgers.
They run the BLINC Network, which was launched in 2020. The BLINC Network provides 24/7/365 crypto payment settlement in various currencies that is free. BLINC members do not need to use SWIFT or SEPA.
Huobi, Scrypt, Bitstamp, Liquid and Wintermute use the network. Sutor Bank have joined the Group, having purchased LAB577 this 2022, BCB have announced a partnership with cloud-based Banking Circle. This enables BCB to have access to SEPA enabled accounts with Banking Circle’s Virtual IBAN.
BCB are accredited by 5 organisations, one of them being Todd McDonald’s Global Digital Finance.
Cordite - Community leader is Royal Bank of Scotland. It is a project to bring a standard to tokens for the Corda system, digital representations of traditional assets. This was not invented by R3 but rather the initiative of the community within Corda.
Xin Fin - (energy efficient) XDC is a settlement token for R3. Hybrid blockchain. Forked off from Quorum. Located in Singapore.
This has been the continued focus of LAB577, a startup helmed by former NatWest banker Richard Crook, which last year announced the Cordite Society, a co-operative registered in the U.K., and its plans to release the XDC crypto token on R3′s Corda.
“Given the tremendous work XinFin have done to support their community and to support their cryptocurrency, they have become the leading token of value within the public Corda network. We are delighted to support XinFin with DASL to get the crypto bridge in place, making it a first for the public Corda network,” said Richard Crook CEO & Founder at LAB577.
Xin Fin in March 2022, announced “Origin”, which is supposed to be a user-friendly platform for the XDC Network. “Origin allows for the creation, issuance, and management of XDC-based token standards via the XDC Network. By leveraging Origin’s rigorously tested smart contract framework, any project or enterprise can mint fungible XRC20 tokens on the XDC Network without writing code or hiring developers.”
Ripple – XRP is a settlement token for R3. In 2017, R3 sued Ripple for failure on an option agreement. Then Ripple sued R3. It started because Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse attempted to terminate a contract Ripple had made with R3 via email to R3's chief executive David Rutter. The agreement gave R3 the right to purchase up to 5 billion XRP digital tokens at $0.0085 until September 2019.
AWS – With R3 they develop CorDapps to work on the Amazon Cloud.
SWIFT – 2019, SWIFT’s software platform, SWIFT GPI, was integrated with Corda.
Goldman Sachs – HQLAx have collaborated with GS to manage the first lending security deal on blockchain. HQLAx utilise R3’s Corda.
This list was going to be a lot longer.
Aaron Grantham – CEO of Ivno when it was sold to R3. Background with Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan, BP. Left Ivno when it was acquired by R3, moving to SPG (Shield Pay), a UK-based digital payments solutions firm.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongrantham/
Farzad Pezeshkpour – worked with NatWest then with LAB577. For the BCB Group he became their CTO in January 2022, in February BCB announced the purchase of LAB577. A key contributor to the Corda project. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dazraf/details/experience/
Richard Crook – leader of LAB577,
Ben Wyeth – a developer and engineer who has worked for RBS and LAB577, now Head of Site Reliability Engineer for BCB Group.
Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie – was a software developer at Merrill Lynch, went to Barclays where he held positions as Quantative Lead, manager of Credit Correlation IT, and VP of Valuations. A consultant for Lloyds and FIS until he started up BCB in 2017. BCB bought LAB577, LAB577 launched the Cordite society . Landsberg-Sadie in an interview, “BCB has focused on the bottom payments layer, alongside the liquidity, banking and trading. While LAB557’s infrastructure focus has been looking ahead at the future of securities and that of interoperability among blockchains.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliversadie/?originalSubdomain=uk
As this is early days for the project, the executive team has not been assembled, not that I know of, I speculate with little doubt that it will be a high-grade team. The core developers are who we know and they are elite. James Carlyle is the jewel.
JAMES CARLYLE
This guy likes sailing and at one point was lost at sea for 40 days. Surviving off of fish, he said this was period was the leanest he has ever been.
Along with Richard Brown and Mike Hearn, Carlyle lead the R3 development team from 2015. As Chief Engineer of R3, James helped design Corda, and sat on R3's Executive and Risk committees. Previously, he was the Chief Engineer for Barclays Corporate Banking, co-founder of several start-ups, and holds multiple patents. James holds a degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Durham University. James has been obsessed with blockchain technology since 2014 because it appeals to his libertarian streak.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescarlyle/
https://twitter.com/jwgcarlyle
Whilst at R3, Carlyle says, “I evaluated the intersection of DeFi with institutional and regulated finance alongside a small team of very talented engineers and business people. We settled on building out Obsuro (https://obscu.ro), a privacy-preserving Ethereum L2 rollup network which uses R3's Conclave confidential computing know-how to encrypt Ethereum smart contracts. I continued to sit on R3's executive board.”
He was working at R3 in total of 6 years and 5 months, the Obscuro project was from Jul 2021 - Mar 2022. From April 2022, he became Obscuro’s CEO, “Obscuro is developing a decentralised Ethereum protocol designed to achieve data confidentiality while maintaining the benefits of a public blockchain network. In doing so it aims to open a new world of use cases on Ethereum such as private NFTs, dark pool trading, gaming, sealed auctions, KYC and more.“
In total, Carlyle was at Barclays for 8 years and 4 months (2006 – 2015). After his first year with the bank, working as an application specialist, he became the Chief Engineer, Personal and Corporate Banking Architecture. As can be imagined with the scale of company and the responsibility of his role, Carlyle worked on expensive programmes for core banking systems that deal with processing vast amounts of money. He states, “The first country implementation for our US market was seen as a remarkable success, and has reliably processed $58 Trillion in its first year.“
These programmes have dealt with large scale consumer data, treasury, finance crime, payment processing, onboarding and more. He has won and judged Barclay hackathons and was Barclays first Ethereum developer – in 2014, he became passionate about the potential of Ethereum. This led him to Corda in November 2015.
Early in his career, He lived and worked in Japan from 1988 to 1994, he continued to work for another Japanese company but in Europe. 1994 to 1997, he worked for The Japan Research Institute as a Development Manager, the JRI is the research arm of Sumitomo Bank.
On Linked In, he sells himself as at the forefront of development ideas. At Four Leaf (1998 – 2000), a match-making site, “My innovations from this time include the pioneering of syndication and rebranding of platform data assets for partner organisations through emerging XML technology, and the concept of multi-dimensional classification, which we later extended at Calaba“
Calaba was a company he co-founded in 2000, this was the relatively early days of mobile internet and devices were obviously not as sophisticated as modern smart phones. “Our early products were a search crawler and indexer tuned for mobile data, and a multi-dimensional classifier and browser that enabled users to home in on highly relevant content using very constrained early mobile keypads and screens.“ Calaba provided services to European telecoms before being sold to Surf Kitchen.
2002, he co-founded FableFlow, he was there for two years, the premise was a messaging engine for lottery & gambling operators and infrastructure providers, content owners, media agencies. The company dissolved in 2011 with their last accounts being documented in 2008. He holds patents in mobile data search and directory technology.
This time in start-ups served Carlyle well, TV remotes had a similar limitation to mobile phones at the time, he could apply is experience and the WAP tech developed at Calaba to Sky and the challenges that comes with their product and tech from 2004 to 2006.
People he mentioned on his linked in:
Ian Valentine - Sky, Linked In is http://tiny.cc/b8ituz ; now a partner at McKenny-McFarlane Capital, who invest in Crypto but no direct investment into Obscuro though. https://www.mckennymcfarlanecapital.com/team
Murray Hancock - Four Leaf Casper Harnung - Fable Flow, Linked In is http://tiny.cc/88ituz
His medium, unactive since 2020 - https://medium.com/@james_85389
https://medium.com/corda/the-birth-of-the-corda-network-foundation-55f346304780 Richard Brown, Mike Hearn, Ian Grigg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkiXDVinvvM Web3 Innovators, Conor Svensson, founder and CEO of Web3 Labs, talks to James Carlyle & Cais Manai of Obscuro Network.
He retweeted this : https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1491098066916556803
MATT CURTIS
As a full-stack developer in the finance industry, Matt has over 10 years of experience designing and developing trading systems and trader tooling at various firms including Goldman Sachs, IG Group and Tyler Capital. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Warwick and is excited to be building on blockchain technology after finally making the leap from traditional finance in 2021.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-curtis-4252973a/
JOEL DUDLEY
Joel started in tech as the head of an insurance data platform. Since the platform's acquisition in 2018, he's held various positions in the blockchain space - developer relations, product management, engineering - always focussed on marrying privacy and blockchain to expand the landscape of potential use-cases. Joel holds a degree in Economics from the University of York.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-dudley-613020a3/
He was at R3 for 5 and a half years.
PEDRO GOMES
With over 10 years of engineering, Pedro took a deep dive from distributed computing, performance engineering and big data to blockchain tech. As a team lead in Ava labs Pedro contributed to the Avalanche ecosystem and spearheaded the chaos and test team. Pedro holds a Masters in Computer Networking from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrovgomes/
https://mobile.twitter.com/gomespedro his followers consist of top end Avax officials.
MORAY GRIEVE
As R3's Head of QA, Moray helped build the test automation and processes for Corda. Before R3, Moray was a Research Physicist in Cambridge and Antarctica, spent 10 years with leading event stream processing engine Apama, and 6 years in investment banking front office. More recently, Moray built the world's largest audio database for the machine learning of sounds and delivered a ground breaking novel geospatial database. He holds a PhD in Physics from Sheffield University and first discovered blockchain in 2017.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraygrieve/
https://github.com/moraygrieve
https://mobile.twitter.com/moraygrieve dead twitter.
At R3 for 2 years.
TUDOR MALENE
Formerly a lead engineer for Corda, Tudor helped build critical components of the platform, and as a solutions architect, contributed to the success of the most important Corda projects. With 20 years of professional experience, Tudor has designed and built solutions ranging from insurance, fintech, banking to media. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and discovered blockchain in 2011.
https://twitter.com/tudormalene
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tudormalene/
Rather low-activity on his socials.
CAIS MANAI
Formerly Product Lead for Digital Assets, Payments and CBDC at R3, Cais has worked with some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions to develop products. Prior to R3, Cais spent 10 years in Finance, leading teams in Prime Brokerage and Equity Derivatives Trading Technology at UBS and Credit Suisse. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from University College, London. Cais first began developing with blockchain in 2012.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/caismanai/
At R3 for 4 years and 10 months.
GAVIN THOMAS
As R3's Engineering COO, Gavin helped deliver the first versions of Corda and subsequently moved to Head of PMO for all Engineering deliveries. He has previously delivered eCommerce trading platforms for a global client base. Gavin holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham and is a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Gavin first understood the unique value of blockchain in 2015 and has not looked back.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavthomas/
At R3 for 6 years and 3 months.
MIKE WARD
In the five years of building blockchain solutions for the finance industry as Head of Product at R3, Mike’s seen first hand how privacy is the key to bringing blockchain to the mainstream. Mike brings more years in software than he’d like to admit. Ten years at Microsoft and eight years at startups in Silicon Valley bring some well worn lessons in how software can eat the world (one bite at a time).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mward/
Some of the links to what I have read and listened to:
https://medium.com/obscuro-labs/challenges-of-crypto-native-gaming-a408badfca90
https://medium.com/obscuro-labs
https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2021/03/bsn-and-r3-corda
https://bsnbase.io/static/tmpFile/BSNIntroductionWhitepaper.pdf
https://bsnbase.io/g/main/serviceNetworkLeague
https://www.linkedin.com/company/shieldpay/
https://crypto-economy.com/ivno-officially-launches-its-tokenization-software-on-r3-corda/
https://www.r3.com/blog/5-trends-defining-blockchains-path-in-2022/
https://craft.co/r3-cev/executives
https://www.ofnumbers.com/2017/02/27/a-brief-history-of-r3-the-distributed-ledger-group/
https://bitsonblocks.net/antony-lewis-my-story/ Antony Lewis, director at R3 Lab and Research Centre, blog.
https://gendal.me/ Richard Brown’s own blog.
https://www.r3.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/HQLAx-ENG.pdf
https://www.r3.com/digital-currencies-hub/
https://www.corda.net/content/corda-platform-whitepaper.pdf
https://www.gdf.io/ Global Digital Finance
https://www.six-group.com/en/home.html Six Group
https://www.sdx.com/news/enterprise-ethereum-alliance-appoints-tim-grant-six-digital-exchange-board
https://www.rieter.com/investor-relations/share-information/significant-shareholders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggqOEGOTwk Carlyle speaking 28th April 2016, talking about R3.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/06/26/banks-are-trying-to-launch-crypto-assets-with-r3-tech/
https://www.bcbgroup.com/blinc/
https://www.r3.com/cordacon/obscuro-casting-a-secret-spell-over-defi/?gated=false Carlyle speaks at Corda Con 2021 about Obscuro.
https://www.r3.com/blog/what-your-bank-is-learning-from-defi/
https://www.r3.com/blog/r3s-commitment-to-interoperability/
https://www.banque-france.fr/sites/default/files/media/2021/12/08/rapport_jura_v11_0.pdf Project Jura - Banque de France report.
https://www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/Jasper-Ubin-Design-Paper.pdf
https://whitepaper.obscu.ro/assets/images/obscuro-whitepaper-0-9.pdf
https://insureblocks.com/?p=17697&=1 SDX article.
3/8/2022
Psilosybe?… p’Silocbey?…. Can I just call you Gary?
Editors note: back when I made this write-up I was in the throes of a bureaucratic battle with my internet provider as I had just moved. It was a long, arduous, dull saga that was finally resolved. However, during it meant I had no internet and I had to utilise my friends WiFi when I had a chance leading to incomplete work. It does still provide a decent amount of intel for you but there are missing bits and parts I wished to continue to build upon. I do have intention to make another piece on Obscuro and R3.
The purpose of this is to assist any research you may conduct on R3 and Obscuro.
I have divided it into two parts. Part 1 is if you would like to have a quick read, skim over the run up to Obscuro. If you have the time then Part 2 is an extrapolation and provides some more detail.
R3 are a first-mover in the DLT/Blockchain space.
R3 was initially called the Distributed Ledger Group (DLG). David E. Rutter, one of the founders of R3 and with a history of banking technology behind him, saw two things, 1) the banks and financial institutions were poor at co-operating thus they were silo-ing their advances on payment systems and 2) Rutter saw the benefits DLT had for payment systems. Rutter, Todd McDonald and Jesse Edwards started DLG and spoke with 8 banks in 2014 about co-operating and developing the next generation of payment systems or risk getting left behind.
By the end of 2015, this consortium grew to 42 banks (see picture below) and there was a name change to R3 CEV – the CEV was dropped. R3 is in reference to the 3 founders and R being Rutter’s first initial of his last name. Jesse Edwards would end up leaving R3 due to strategy of the investment arm of R3; Edwards wanted to pursue a private wing that was outside of the firm whilst McDonald and Rutter wanted to keep it in-house.
In 2017, R3 raised the highest fund round for DLT at that point, totalling around $107mm. R3 have some of the best engineering talent with banking bank grounds, with the collaboration of the financial institutions, R3 has worked closely with regulators and continue to do so. They provide for clients needs on individual projects but R3’s main products are the Corda Network and Conclave.
Corda Network is an internet of Corda nodes. It is an operating system rather than a bespoke service. It is a private, permissioned shared-ledger. It has a regulatory node, through which data can be pushed to or pulled by the regulator. The Corda Foundation was established in the Netherlands and this makes sure that bad things won’t happen.
This foundation is the Governance Body of Corda. It is set up in the Netherlands. It has no shareholders and cannot distribute a dividend, it cannot make a profit. It has a board of directors, 11 seats. The directors are nominated by people and elected by participants. The population votes for the board and the board makes the decisions.
R3 have huge clients. Two name two. SDX and BSN. What is an SDX and a BSN? Dodgy sex moves? No. Swiss Digital Exchange and Blockchain-based Service Network.
BSN was launched in April 2020. It is led by the Blockchain Service Network Development Association (BSN Development Association) who are responsible for development, operations and maintenance of the BSN, this includes the SIC (Chinese state State Information Centre), UnionPay – which is the largest bank card organisation in the world - as well as companies from China’s finance, software and telecoms sector.
It is a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network used to deploy and operate all types of blockchain applications. The intention of the BSN is to provide fast blockchain tech that is adopted across the world that is, most importantly, led by Chinese entities.
SDX is run by the SIX group who run the Swiss financial infrastructure and they bought the BME, essentially a group that runs the Spanish stock exchange. In May 2022 alone, 109.4 bn CHF (roughly 113.67bn USD) was exchanged. Being Swiss-based, SIX work with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) who themselves are keen to install CBDCs, this has naturally brought R3, BIS, and SDX into collaboration.
To summarise just those two clients alone, R3 are positioned with financial centres of the world, assisting with infrastructure of the financial institutions, one is a Taiwan-hating superpower, the other a neutral-loving place with the oldest financial institution in the world.
Corda has produced an avid community of users, Cordite is a consequence. Cordite is independent from R3, it is users who have been attempting to bring Defi to Corda. Significant positions of Cordite are held by RBS employees, Richard Crook worked for RBS, became the Director for Cordite. Lo and behold, the FCA, RBS and Cordite developed a mortgage transaction app in 2017.
To Conclave. Conclave came later and this shields data in order to keep commerce secure. Then funny enough, not long after Conclave was produced, R3 announced they were working on project Obscuro in the summer of 2021. At Corda Con 2021, James Carlyle gave a brief talk on Obscuro, highlighting the growth of Defi and the necessity of privacy on transactions in order to stop fronting-running (MEV). Front running in early 2021 was valued at $1.4bn. As of May 2021, the total value of cryptocurrency traded across decentralized exchanges (DEXes) has reached more than $58 billion.
After a while of incubation Obscuro moved out of the parents’ house. The reasoning being R3 is based in the regulated space, for Obscuro, the culture, tech and target market are different to the enterprise space that Corda operates in, so it is appropriate to take this away from R3 as a separate project. In turn, the success of Obscuro could well drive interest back towards R3’s Conclave.
The closest comparison on the market is Cosmos’ Secret Network, it utilises the TEE technology. As of August 2022, it has a market cap of $190mm. Now, the real value is with Ethereum and we are familiar with the market caps of Layer 2’s but just to bring it to the conscious thought: Optimism is around $375mm, Metis $145mm, and there is the Polygon in the corner standing at a modest $6.8bn.
James Carlyle see’s defi bifurcating, there will be the dominant regulated space and then the other side of it, evoking images of the wild west. Obscuro is positioning itself towards the regulated side of that space and being a first-mover with a history of working with regulators it is primed for success.
2014. founded. Originally called R3 CEV. R comes from the CEO’s first initial of their last name, and the 3 stands for the original 3 founders. CEV stood for “Consulting”, “Exchange”, “Venture”.
There is a roundtable of 8 banks to discuss and educate on the benefits of blockchain.
2015. 9 banks form the partnership that is R3 – Barclays, BBVA, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Commonwealth Bank, Credit Suisse, State Street, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland – as well as DRW, Align Commerce, Perkins Coie, Boost VC, and Fintech Collective. This later grows 42 founding members of the consortium in 3 months, this included Stanford, Andreessen Horowitz, Xapo, BitGo, Chain, Ripple and Mirror.
Later in 2015, Hyperledger, the Bank of England, Align Commerce, and Blockstock attended the third and final roundtable hosted in NYC.
Initial press releases of the consortium came under the name DLG (Distributed Ledger Group).
Richard Brown led the development and in October 2015, James Carlyle (Chief Engineer) and Mike Hearn (Lead Platform Engineer) joined the development team.
2016. April 5th, Corda is first publicly explained. Richard Brown explicitly said that Corda was a DLT not a blockchain. November, CEV is chopped from the name.
In 2016, Bank of Canada (BOC) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) embarked on Project Jasper and Project Ubin, respectively, to explore the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the clearing and settlement of payments and securities. JP Morgan and Accenture helped with the experiment. Canada utilised Corda and Singapore utilised Quorum.
2017. R3 raises largest fund - $107mm – for DLT tech at the time. It splits into two groups; Corda platform as well as the Lab and Research Centre.
International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA) joins the Corda Network.
2018. Corda Enterprises. Ecosystem reaches 300.
R3, TradeIX (Marco Polo Network) and the participating banks - Bangkok Bank, Barclays, BBVA, Bladex, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, CTBC Bank, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, Shinhan Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo - begin developing an end-to-end open account trade finance business network powered by TradeIX (Marco Polo Network) and R3’s Corda distributed ledger platform.
2019. Corda Enterprise 4 GA.
Wells Fargo use Corda for internal transfers of their digital cash, which is more flexible in availability for settlements than SWIFT.
LAB577 release DASL and BCB utilise it to bring crypto to Corda, more importantly, cash to ledger.
R3 and Marco Polo Network conduct a few trials, all are successful. Company included Daimler AG, Dürr AG, Alfa-Bank, Novolipetsk Steel Company, Commerzbank and Vesuvius GmbH along with BNY Mellon joining MPN.
2021. Conclave launches.
July, Mobifi announce they completed the first bridge protocol that allows coins to be swapped between the Corda network and the Ethereum blockchain as well as a mobile app to conduct the swap. Intention is to bridge Corda with other chains such as Polygon.
September 2021, R3 announced they had a project in DeFi called Obscuro with James Carlyle conducting a talk at Corda Con 2021.
In June 2021, Project Jura saw Banque de France, BIS, and the Swiss National Bank use wholesale CBDC’s on SDX platform, which runs on Corda, with Natixis, which is an administrator. Corda’s privacy designed proved to BIS et al that the application has low energy consumption, comparable to conventional database applications. The SIC and TARGET2 systems were used to underpin the real value of the CHF and EUR involved with the wCBDCs. SDX, with FINMA authorisation and provided the test environment. The Digital Asset Registry (DAR) records holdings and transfer, Natixis is a registrar of DAR and provided the gateway to the SDX platform.
BIS’s Project Dunbar launches, BIS worked with R3’s Corda and also used Partior – this is built on Quorum. The prototypes that have been come from these systems were made with the intention to test interoperability and a shared platform for banks to make international settlements with multiple CBDCs, probing the question whether DLT technology can help progress wholesale payments between banks. Led by the Singapore-wing of the BIS Innovation Hub, the institutions involved were the Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank Negara Malaysia, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and South African Reserve Bank.
These experiments prove there is more financial stability with CBDC platform in the sense commercial banks have direct access to them rather than relying on correspondent banks, central bank money is only available via settlement accounts to certain banks; there is faster completion and operating windows are far wider than the current system; and diversity of asset availability can lead to competition.
They are a step forward but still relatively limited in the number of countries involved compared to the end goal of global cross-border payments.
David E. Rutter – CEO, Founder.
In money markets from 1984, ten years later, he started electronic trading with his joint-venture firm, Chicago Board Brokerage, launched an e-trading platform for US Treasuries. For another ten years, he was at ICAP PLC as the CEO of Electronic Broking – the world’s largest interdealer broker - where he ran BrokerTec fixed income and EBS foreign exchange platforms.
Founded a collaboration model to solve industry level problem. Making the system more efficient as well as reaching more customers. To build a frictionless digital economy that reaches a wider audience, built by the established institutions within finance. Before, these institutions sought improvement to systems on their own accord, leading to a silo effect in innovation, however, through collaboration they are more likely to succeed to creating the cost-effective change for high-level finance they are each seeking.
https://twitter.com/daviderutter1 https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviderutter/
Todd McDonald – Co-Founder of R3, CPO.
Worked for IBM, Standard Chartered Bank, as a Consultant on Emerging Markets, State Street, Barnes Brothers Unlimited and R3. He helped establish the GDF – Global Digital Finance. GDF brags having over 350 partnerships, which include R3 (of course), London Stock Exchange, SDX, BTI, Crypto Asset Lab, Crypto.com, EY, DTCC, ING, LCX, Standard Chartered, Qredo, Luno, DGEN….). He has served on the governing board of Hyperledger.
“We are excited for blockchain technology, in fact we are betting our careers on it… We feel that blockchain technology for financial services can drastically change how not only the banks and institutions do business but how customers interact with financial institutions… Now they can do more outside of the four walls of their institution in a shared service that is more secure and more efficient at a much lower cost.”
These are McDonald’s words from Corda Con –
“In 2016, when we were putting together the first business plan for R3, a few of us gave ourselves the assignment of a view ahead to 2030… the role of banks will shift to become service portals for both retail and corporate customers. Driven by consumer habits and strong examples in other industries see
“Software Eats The World”. Banks will need to embrace the world as a service provider within the respective monetary and sovereign zones or they will risk becoming more and more of a utility.
“CBDC will exist in some form, exacerbating the need for banks to move to the services model and users will have much less intermediate access to cash funding… We are still to see where the CBDC will come from but this is guaranteed to happen.
“What is value in this scenario? 24/7 access to all the dematerialised assets that a company or individual owns or controls. The definition of an asset will expand beyond todays conception as when more things can be safely, securely and efficiently dematerialised then more things can be assigned to have value. “Therefore, there will be an explosion in the number of agreements between actors this will lead to a need for a low-friction way for those agreements to both be managed and secured.
“Increasing the risk and complexity associated with that means that trust will reside somewhere and with stewards of trust that have expertise and a solid reputation. Yet, borders will not magically dissolve, this leads to having a trusted, federated network for assets obligations and agreements across countries or regions that has the proper regulatory bide for their respective monetary zones.
“This network will not only move assets but move and track agreements, which will have controlled visibility and potentially enforceability of obligations that relate to that agreement.”
https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvmcdonald/
Jesse Edwards – Co-founder, former CFO.
He was going to establish Adorc, an independent venture firm that would drive Corda adoption but Corda decided to go with an in-house venture arm to help with that goal. He had an investment banking background with Sandler O’Neill and AGC Partner, his Linked In is dormant and the last position it shows is co-founder of Liquidity Edge between 2015 – 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseledwards/
Richard Brown – CTO
This is some of the investors of R3.
Temasek - https://www.temasek.com.sg/en/index
Mizuho Capital
HSBC
Credit Suisse
Intel Capital
Barclays
CLS - https://www.cls-group.com/
ING
Sumitomo
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
BNP Paribas
Deutsche Bank
Ping An
The Royal Bank of Scotland
U.S. Bank
Societe Generale
There are many more clients and partnerships that are listed here.
Corda is R3’s enterprise blockchain platform and Conclave is R3’s confidential computing platform. Native applications to Corda are called CorDapps.
Corda - uses a novel consensus mechanism in which transactions are cryptographically linked but does not periodically batch multiple transactions into a block rather all transactions are processed in real-time.
Smart contracts in Corda can be written in Java or Kotlin. Corda also provides developer tools ranging from: Corda Network Builder, Network Bootstrapper, DemoBench, Node Explorer, Checkpoint Tooling.
Corda Network is an internet of Corda nodes.
Organisations tended to think about running an isolated Corda node. However, Carlyle and co went with the plan of organisations building their applications on top of the Corda Network, meaning the organisation does not have to build their own network and one that is isolated. What benefit does this bring?
In one word: interoperability. Having one Corda network rather than segregated networks makes the singular larger one more useful, it allows applications to mingle with other applications.
First transaction on Corda was a bond, they showed a bond could be exchanged with cash on Corda.
James Carlyle says, Corda is aiming to be this invisible technical network that apps exist on, likening it to the internet, a person may not understand how the internet operates but they will use it, they can rely on it working and applications are built on top of it.
Conclave – This is to shield data from public exposure. This keeps commerce secure and confidential.
BSN China – Blockchain-based Service Network launched in April 2020. It is led by the Blockchain Service Network Development Association (BSN Development Association) is responsible for development, operations and maintenance of the BSN, this includes the SIC (Chinese state State Information Centre) as well as companies from China’s finance, software and telecoms sector.
It is a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network used to deploy and operate all types of blockchain applications. The intention of the BSN is to provide fast blockchain tech that is adopted across the world that is, most importantly, led by Chinese entities.
It is adapted to Fabric, FISCO, BCOS, CITA, Xuperchain, Wutong Chain and Brochain, Corda, and the public blockchains Ethereum, EOS, Near, Solana, Algorand, Oasis, Polkadot, Nervos and more. Its technical partners include Daml, Dfuse, Industria and EOS foundation.
2022 August is the intended launch date for the Spartan Network. Spartan Network (SN) is China’s international service, open source and is supposedly free from Government observance. SN will operate on the US Dollar. BSN is working on a Universal Digital Payment Network that will integrate various CBDCs.
China are looking to carry out judicial activities on blockchain by 2025.
Insurwave – EY and blockchain company Guardtime have built a blockchain based maritime insurance platform built on Corda, creating an immutable database between shippers and insurers to allow for better risk assessments and quicker claims payouts.
Ledger Edge – May 2022, it became the first regulated corporate bond trading platform built using distributed ledger technology powered by Corda. Fully regulated by the FCA. It is a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF). David Nicol is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ledger Edge. Nicol was at IBM before becoming Product Manager at R3 from 2017 to 2020. March 2020 is when he co-founded Ledger Edge.
It has started in the UK before launching in the US then the EU MTF realm.
Ivno – In 2021, R3 acquired Ivno’s team and tech. Ivno developed a tokenisation software with fraud prevention and regulatory compliance at heart. It helps mint and manage stablecoins, tokenise any asset quickly, multi-asset management, and as it was deployed on R3’s Corda, it could work with blockchain and native apps on Corda. It was trailed on Corda in April 2021 and then new of R3 purchasing Ivno came out in October 2021.
SIX SDX – SIX (Swiss Infrastructure and Exchange) group operates the Swiss financial infrastructure. They have their own venture wing as well as running the SIX Digital Exchange. In 2020, SBI Digital Asset Holdings and SIX they will do a joint venture to produce the largest liquid hub for financial institutions in Singapore.
Tim Grant worked at R3 then SIX. At SIX he also joined the EEA. Then moved to Galaxy Digital.
SDX is a part of Chamber of Digital Commerce and GBBC (and IWA, Inter Work Alliance), OMFIF, WEF.
“The company is owned by 121 domestic and international financial institutions, which are also the main users of its services. The shares are distributed such that no single owner or type of bank has an absolute majority.”
BIS projects – Project Jura, Project Helvetia and Project Dunbar.
Project Ubin by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Project Jasper by the Bank of Canada.
Riksbank – piloted the e-Krona on the Corda system.
Bank of Kazakhstan – Digital Tenge project.
Accenture – often are present in projects with R3.
Marco Polo Network – This is a collaboration of R3 and TradeIX, an Irish-based tech firm. MPN is a trade finance network. They successfully completed the largest Blockchain Open Account Trade Finance Trial on R3's Corda platform.
TradeIX Limited carried on with its name but then officially changed it to Marco Polo Network. They provide blockchain solutions for supply-chains and trade finance.
MPN have strategic partnerships with Accenture, R3, Mastercard, Commerzbank, Microsoft to name a few. For something named Marco Polo Network, ironically, its bases are heavily centred in Western Europe with Asian bases in UAE and Singapore.
HSBC - HSBC conducted the first live trade finance transaction on the Corda platform in May 2018.
HSBlox – They launched with R3 Corda Healthcare Community. HSBlox released RevBlox on Corda. HSBlox has a background in healthcare, supply chain and fintech. They utilise machine learning and blockchain to provide real-time information and interventions. In 2018, Todd McDonald was brought onto the board of HSBlox. HSBlox went on to produce Digital Sample Manager (DSM) on Corda.
One Hypernet – Singapore-based project provides cross-border payments and foreign exchange to banks, payment providers and corporations. It does this by building on Corda and utilising Conclave. They work with R3 and Intel.
LAB577 – started up by former NatWest software engineers, Banker Richard Crook. Farzad Pezeshkpour,
Co-author software solutions for financial institutions in emerging technology.
577 made DASL (Digital Asset Shared Ledger). Richard Crook said Corda Network provides privacy, which is crucial to financial institutions. DASL provides liquidity to previous illiquid assets. With their partnership with BCB Group, ERC-20 tokens are able to flow onto the Corda Network, this allows projects to raise ICO’s and build on Corda.
BCB Group announced their purchase of LAB577 at the beginning of 2022.
BCB Group – Founded by Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, in his own words, BCB is a “business banking challenger”, it is the UK’s first and only financially regulated payment institution dedicated to the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, and the only dual-regulated group spanning UK and Switzerland.
The first financial institution combining business accounts, cryptocurrency markets and digital asset custody in one integrated solution, with a client list that includes the world's largest cryptocurrency venues including Galaxy Digital, Bitstamp, Bitpay. It provides business accounts and trading services in the digital asset economy. BCB Group’s executive team have worked for Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Investec, Lloyds Commercial Bank, Norton Rose Fulbright, FIS and Sun Life of Canada. Aiming to provide end-to-end integrated infrastructure covering payments, trading and custody.
January 2022, BCB raised $60mm in a Series A round of funding, the largest in the UK blockchain industry. Bought LAB577 in 2022.
BCB want to bring Crypto to Corda. They use DASL to provide integration of fiat banking and crypto ledgers.
They run the BLINC Network, which was launched in 2020. The BLINC Network provides 24/7/365 crypto payment settlement in various currencies that is free. BLINC members do not need to use SWIFT or SEPA.
Huobi, Scrypt, Bitstamp, Liquid and Wintermute use the network. Sutor Bank have joined the Group, having purchased LAB577 this 2022, BCB have announced a partnership with cloud-based Banking Circle. This enables BCB to have access to SEPA enabled accounts with Banking Circle’s Virtual IBAN.
BCB are accredited by 5 organisations, one of them being Todd McDonald’s Global Digital Finance.
Cordite - Community leader is Royal Bank of Scotland. It is a project to bring a standard to tokens for the Corda system, digital representations of traditional assets. This was not invented by R3 but rather the initiative of the community within Corda.
Xin Fin - (energy efficient) XDC is a settlement token for R3. Hybrid blockchain. Forked off from Quorum. Located in Singapore.
This has been the continued focus of LAB577, a startup helmed by former NatWest banker Richard Crook, which last year announced the Cordite Society, a co-operative registered in the U.K., and its plans to release the XDC crypto token on R3′s Corda.
“Given the tremendous work XinFin have done to support their community and to support their cryptocurrency, they have become the leading token of value within the public Corda network. We are delighted to support XinFin with DASL to get the crypto bridge in place, making it a first for the public Corda network,” said Richard Crook CEO & Founder at LAB577.
Xin Fin in March 2022, announced “Origin”, which is supposed to be a user-friendly platform for the XDC Network. “Origin allows for the creation, issuance, and management of XDC-based token standards via the XDC Network. By leveraging Origin’s rigorously tested smart contract framework, any project or enterprise can mint fungible XRC20 tokens on the XDC Network without writing code or hiring developers.”
Ripple – XRP is a settlement token for R3. In 2017, R3 sued Ripple for failure on an option agreement. Then Ripple sued R3. It started because Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse attempted to terminate a contract Ripple had made with R3 via email to R3's chief executive David Rutter. The agreement gave R3 the right to purchase up to 5 billion XRP digital tokens at $0.0085 until September 2019.
AWS – With R3 they develop CorDapps to work on the Amazon Cloud.
SWIFT – 2019, SWIFT’s software platform, SWIFT GPI, was integrated with Corda.
Goldman Sachs – HQLAx have collaborated with GS to manage the first lending security deal on blockchain. HQLAx utilise R3’s Corda.
This list was going to be a lot longer.
Aaron Grantham – CEO of Ivno when it was sold to R3. Background with Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan, BP. Left Ivno when it was acquired by R3, moving to SPG (Shield Pay), a UK-based digital payments solutions firm.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongrantham/
Farzad Pezeshkpour – worked with NatWest then with LAB577. For the BCB Group he became their CTO in January 2022, in February BCB announced the purchase of LAB577. A key contributor to the Corda project. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dazraf/details/experience/
Richard Crook – leader of LAB577,
Ben Wyeth – a developer and engineer who has worked for RBS and LAB577, now Head of Site Reliability Engineer for BCB Group.
Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie – was a software developer at Merrill Lynch, went to Barclays where he held positions as Quantative Lead, manager of Credit Correlation IT, and VP of Valuations. A consultant for Lloyds and FIS until he started up BCB in 2017. BCB bought LAB577, LAB577 launched the Cordite society . Landsberg-Sadie in an interview, “BCB has focused on the bottom payments layer, alongside the liquidity, banking and trading. While LAB557’s infrastructure focus has been looking ahead at the future of securities and that of interoperability among blockchains.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliversadie/?originalSubdomain=uk
As this is early days for the project, the executive team has not been assembled, not that I know of, I speculate with little doubt that it will be a high-grade team. The core developers are who we know and they are elite. James Carlyle is the jewel.
JAMES CARLYLE
This guy likes sailing and at one point was lost at sea for 40 days. Surviving off of fish, he said this was period was the leanest he has ever been.
Along with Richard Brown and Mike Hearn, Carlyle lead the R3 development team from 2015. As Chief Engineer of R3, James helped design Corda, and sat on R3's Executive and Risk committees. Previously, he was the Chief Engineer for Barclays Corporate Banking, co-founder of several start-ups, and holds multiple patents. James holds a degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Durham University. James has been obsessed with blockchain technology since 2014 because it appeals to his libertarian streak.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescarlyle/
https://twitter.com/jwgcarlyle
Whilst at R3, Carlyle says, “I evaluated the intersection of DeFi with institutional and regulated finance alongside a small team of very talented engineers and business people. We settled on building out Obsuro (https://obscu.ro), a privacy-preserving Ethereum L2 rollup network which uses R3's Conclave confidential computing know-how to encrypt Ethereum smart contracts. I continued to sit on R3's executive board.”
He was working at R3 in total of 6 years and 5 months, the Obscuro project was from Jul 2021 - Mar 2022. From April 2022, he became Obscuro’s CEO, “Obscuro is developing a decentralised Ethereum protocol designed to achieve data confidentiality while maintaining the benefits of a public blockchain network. In doing so it aims to open a new world of use cases on Ethereum such as private NFTs, dark pool trading, gaming, sealed auctions, KYC and more.“
In total, Carlyle was at Barclays for 8 years and 4 months (2006 – 2015). After his first year with the bank, working as an application specialist, he became the Chief Engineer, Personal and Corporate Banking Architecture. As can be imagined with the scale of company and the responsibility of his role, Carlyle worked on expensive programmes for core banking systems that deal with processing vast amounts of money. He states, “The first country implementation for our US market was seen as a remarkable success, and has reliably processed $58 Trillion in its first year.“
These programmes have dealt with large scale consumer data, treasury, finance crime, payment processing, onboarding and more. He has won and judged Barclay hackathons and was Barclays first Ethereum developer – in 2014, he became passionate about the potential of Ethereum. This led him to Corda in November 2015.
Early in his career, He lived and worked in Japan from 1988 to 1994, he continued to work for another Japanese company but in Europe. 1994 to 1997, he worked for The Japan Research Institute as a Development Manager, the JRI is the research arm of Sumitomo Bank.
On Linked In, he sells himself as at the forefront of development ideas. At Four Leaf (1998 – 2000), a match-making site, “My innovations from this time include the pioneering of syndication and rebranding of platform data assets for partner organisations through emerging XML technology, and the concept of multi-dimensional classification, which we later extended at Calaba“
Calaba was a company he co-founded in 2000, this was the relatively early days of mobile internet and devices were obviously not as sophisticated as modern smart phones. “Our early products were a search crawler and indexer tuned for mobile data, and a multi-dimensional classifier and browser that enabled users to home in on highly relevant content using very constrained early mobile keypads and screens.“ Calaba provided services to European telecoms before being sold to Surf Kitchen.
2002, he co-founded FableFlow, he was there for two years, the premise was a messaging engine for lottery & gambling operators and infrastructure providers, content owners, media agencies. The company dissolved in 2011 with their last accounts being documented in 2008. He holds patents in mobile data search and directory technology.
This time in start-ups served Carlyle well, TV remotes had a similar limitation to mobile phones at the time, he could apply is experience and the WAP tech developed at Calaba to Sky and the challenges that comes with their product and tech from 2004 to 2006.
People he mentioned on his linked in:
Ian Valentine - Sky, Linked In is http://tiny.cc/b8ituz ; now a partner at McKenny-McFarlane Capital, who invest in Crypto but no direct investment into Obscuro though. https://www.mckennymcfarlanecapital.com/team
Murray Hancock - Four Leaf Casper Harnung - Fable Flow, Linked In is http://tiny.cc/88ituz
His medium, unactive since 2020 - https://medium.com/@james_85389
https://medium.com/corda/the-birth-of-the-corda-network-foundation-55f346304780 Richard Brown, Mike Hearn, Ian Grigg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkiXDVinvvM Web3 Innovators, Conor Svensson, founder and CEO of Web3 Labs, talks to James Carlyle & Cais Manai of Obscuro Network.
He retweeted this : https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1491098066916556803
MATT CURTIS
As a full-stack developer in the finance industry, Matt has over 10 years of experience designing and developing trading systems and trader tooling at various firms including Goldman Sachs, IG Group and Tyler Capital. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Warwick and is excited to be building on blockchain technology after finally making the leap from traditional finance in 2021.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-curtis-4252973a/
JOEL DUDLEY
Joel started in tech as the head of an insurance data platform. Since the platform's acquisition in 2018, he's held various positions in the blockchain space - developer relations, product management, engineering - always focussed on marrying privacy and blockchain to expand the landscape of potential use-cases. Joel holds a degree in Economics from the University of York.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-dudley-613020a3/
He was at R3 for 5 and a half years.
PEDRO GOMES
With over 10 years of engineering, Pedro took a deep dive from distributed computing, performance engineering and big data to blockchain tech. As a team lead in Ava labs Pedro contributed to the Avalanche ecosystem and spearheaded the chaos and test team. Pedro holds a Masters in Computer Networking from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrovgomes/
https://mobile.twitter.com/gomespedro his followers consist of top end Avax officials.
MORAY GRIEVE
As R3's Head of QA, Moray helped build the test automation and processes for Corda. Before R3, Moray was a Research Physicist in Cambridge and Antarctica, spent 10 years with leading event stream processing engine Apama, and 6 years in investment banking front office. More recently, Moray built the world's largest audio database for the machine learning of sounds and delivered a ground breaking novel geospatial database. He holds a PhD in Physics from Sheffield University and first discovered blockchain in 2017.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraygrieve/
https://github.com/moraygrieve
https://mobile.twitter.com/moraygrieve dead twitter.
At R3 for 2 years.
TUDOR MALENE
Formerly a lead engineer for Corda, Tudor helped build critical components of the platform, and as a solutions architect, contributed to the success of the most important Corda projects. With 20 years of professional experience, Tudor has designed and built solutions ranging from insurance, fintech, banking to media. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and discovered blockchain in 2011.
https://twitter.com/tudormalene
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tudormalene/
Rather low-activity on his socials.
CAIS MANAI
Formerly Product Lead for Digital Assets, Payments and CBDC at R3, Cais has worked with some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions to develop products. Prior to R3, Cais spent 10 years in Finance, leading teams in Prime Brokerage and Equity Derivatives Trading Technology at UBS and Credit Suisse. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from University College, London. Cais first began developing with blockchain in 2012.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/caismanai/
At R3 for 4 years and 10 months.
GAVIN THOMAS
As R3's Engineering COO, Gavin helped deliver the first versions of Corda and subsequently moved to Head of PMO for all Engineering deliveries. He has previously delivered eCommerce trading platforms for a global client base. Gavin holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham and is a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Gavin first understood the unique value of blockchain in 2015 and has not looked back.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavthomas/
At R3 for 6 years and 3 months.
MIKE WARD
In the five years of building blockchain solutions for the finance industry as Head of Product at R3, Mike’s seen first hand how privacy is the key to bringing blockchain to the mainstream. Mike brings more years in software than he’d like to admit. Ten years at Microsoft and eight years at startups in Silicon Valley bring some well worn lessons in how software can eat the world (one bite at a time).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mward/
Some of the links to what I have read and listened to:
https://medium.com/obscuro-labs/challenges-of-crypto-native-gaming-a408badfca90
https://medium.com/obscuro-labs
https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2021/03/bsn-and-r3-corda
https://bsnbase.io/static/tmpFile/BSNIntroductionWhitepaper.pdf
https://bsnbase.io/g/main/serviceNetworkLeague
https://www.linkedin.com/company/shieldpay/
https://crypto-economy.com/ivno-officially-launches-its-tokenization-software-on-r3-corda/
https://www.r3.com/blog/5-trends-defining-blockchains-path-in-2022/
https://craft.co/r3-cev/executives
https://www.ofnumbers.com/2017/02/27/a-brief-history-of-r3-the-distributed-ledger-group/
https://bitsonblocks.net/antony-lewis-my-story/ Antony Lewis, director at R3 Lab and Research Centre, blog.
https://gendal.me/ Richard Brown’s own blog.
https://www.r3.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/HQLAx-ENG.pdf
https://www.r3.com/digital-currencies-hub/
https://www.corda.net/content/corda-platform-whitepaper.pdf
https://www.gdf.io/ Global Digital Finance
https://www.six-group.com/en/home.html Six Group
https://www.sdx.com/news/enterprise-ethereum-alliance-appoints-tim-grant-six-digital-exchange-board
https://www.rieter.com/investor-relations/share-information/significant-shareholders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggqOEGOTwk Carlyle speaking 28th April 2016, talking about R3.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/06/26/banks-are-trying-to-launch-crypto-assets-with-r3-tech/
https://www.bcbgroup.com/blinc/
https://www.r3.com/cordacon/obscuro-casting-a-secret-spell-over-defi/?gated=false Carlyle speaks at Corda Con 2021 about Obscuro.
https://www.r3.com/blog/what-your-bank-is-learning-from-defi/
https://www.r3.com/blog/r3s-commitment-to-interoperability/
https://www.banque-france.fr/sites/default/files/media/2021/12/08/rapport_jura_v11_0.pdf Project Jura - Banque de France report.
https://www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/Jasper-Ubin-Design-Paper.pdf
https://whitepaper.obscu.ro/assets/images/obscuro-whitepaper-0-9.pdf
https://insureblocks.com/?p=17697&=1 SDX article.
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