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...
PsilocybeR3: Obscuro In Context
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 contin...
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...
PsilocybeR3: Obscuro In Context
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 contin...
Twitter : @Psilocybe____
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Subscribe to Psilocybe
Subscribe to Psilocybe
Having an understanding of R3 will help provide reassurance on the standard of team working on TEN, the confidential roll-up that is encrypting Ethereum.
With any movement, any revolution, factions’ splinter and head in different directions.
Bitcoin is an intriguing revolution as it started on the internet and gradually made more noise in people’s everyday lives. Bitcoin is revolutionary because it is currency that needs miners and the internet, as it is a decentralised ledger it does not need central banks. You cannot stop it unless there is a solar flare, this remarkable arrangement of maths cannot be suppressed with violence.
I have heard the phrase that puts it well, fiat is controlled by governments, crypto is controlled by code.
In the beginning of Bitcoin there were factions on which direction it should go, allow me to be terse on the factions:
There is the faction that wanted to legitimise Bitcoin, make it appropriate for day-to-day payments and integrate with the day-to-day economy. This is the likes of Mike Hearn.
There is the side that wanted to stimulate an alternative economy whereby Bitcoin does not integrate with the central bank economy. Amir Taaki is perhaps the most infamous of the more anarchistic side of Bitcoin.
Finally, there were those that wanted to open up the scripting language and build on top of Bitcoin, there were things called Colored Coins and this was an attempt to have RWAs on top of Bitcoin. Buterin dived into the world of Bitcoin in 2011 and by the end of 2013 he initiated Ethereum.
My focus of this essay is towards CORDA by R3
Mike Hearn went on to work with R3 after David Rutter hired Richard Brown to assemble a team to build out DLT for banks. Globalisation happened with the use of paper; I have heard statistics that $50tn is moved around on paper.
What a wonderful thing paper is, how many books, memories, and life stories have traversed across time by someone simply putting ink to page. Yet, for management, it can be clumsy. The inherent characteristics of blockchain/DLT architecture and design provide properties like transparency, robustness, auditability, and instant settlement.
The business world is based on agreements. There was a dream where two people could enter a room, discuss the agreement and a computer device would store that agreement. Then along came DLT and it was possible to have an immutable ledger.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said, “What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.” Reducing transaction costs and risks does change the world, it speeds up transactions, it delivers information faster and more efficiently, those costs that would otherwise go on intermediary fees go back into the economy.
Traditional accounting systems rely on double-entry bookkeeping, where each transaction is recorded as a debit in one account and a credit in another, balancing the books. While double-entry accounting is a well-established method, it depends on the honesty and accuracy of the involved parties, making it susceptible to fraud or manipulation.
Now there is, triple-entry accounting, a system that adds a cryptographic layer that effectively creates a third ledger: a shared, immutable record of transactions signed and verified by both parties and, crucially, by a third-party cryptographic system.
Nick Szabo came up with smart contracts however, smart contracts were powerful but not accessible or interpretable by the legal community. Fellow cypherpunk Ian Grigg recognised this gap and came up with the Ricardian contract in 1995.
Grigg co-founded Systemics in the mid-90s, the company established a focus on building open-source financial cryptography systems, and Open Transactions was a framework for cryptographically secure, decentralised financial transactions, that Systemics incubated.
The Ricardian Contract was introduced as a method to encode contracts that could be digitally signed, verified, and stored, while still being legally enforceable.
This was a breakthrough as when organisations work together, the computer part of the agreement can be fault in the process, now it can help assure counter-party arrangements.
We have then the development of The Internet of Agreements (IoA). R3 is comprised of financial institutions getting together to collaborate and work towards methods to upgrade the financial plumbing.
Having a decentralised method, providing a trustless process, is great for collaboration and trust with counter-parties. Without a centre, the ledger is the same for all participants, transactions are cleared through blocks rather than clearing houses. Blockchains tend to get stronger with more participants as one entity is not in charge and the record is permanent, this is great for dispute settlement as well as instant settlement.
Furthermore, automation provided by smart contracts helps speed up processing of regulation. Each nation has various rules that can take time for intermediaries to iron out. With smart contracts and with AI getting stronger, there can be an accelerated way provided to deal with this.
Richard Brown, James Carlyle, Mike Hearn worked alongside Ian Grigg on the original R3 Corda whitepaper - docs.r3.com/en/pdf/corda-introductory-whitepaper.pdf
Corda is a permissioned network designed for a shared record of agreements between regulated financial institutions.
Corda has state object or state*.* It represents a specific agreement or contract, like a real-world contract.
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, transaction data is globally broadcasted. Corda has “Flow”. This is where the relevant shared transaction data (state objects) is provided to relevant involved parties but not broadcasted globally.
Corda is DLT not blockchain, it does not record into blocks. It has Notaries, a Notary is an entity that provides transaction ordering and timestamping services.
It has Cordapps, which, as you can guess, are apps built on Corda.
The industrial age and the Pax Americana post-World War 2 has helped accelerate globalisation. Corda is one progression of business and international co-operation, this is another phase of globalisation – Globalisation 2.0, if you will. There is an intention for a unified layer, something that can make it much faster and easier to abstract and transact between parties on a global level.
Here is a good graphic of some of Corda’s scope:
R3 work with banks and central authorities, this includes:
· Bank of Canada
· Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
· European Central Bank (ECB)
· Central Bank of Brazil
· South African Reserve Bank
· Bank of Thailand
· HSBC
· ING
· Barclays
· UBS
· Wells Fargo
· Credit Suisse
· BNP Paribas
· Deutsche Bank
· Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)
They work a broad range of supply chains, legal services, healthcare services, energy and commodity firms.
R3 are among the standard-setters in the DLT space. They even work on the RLN – The Regulated Liability Network. There is an RLN in USA and UK, it is a collaboration and a consortium, one which R3 plays a strong leadership role as it is applies the technological foundation. It is to help test and provide the infrastructure for various forms of digital money – stablecoins, CBDCs, commercial bank money, and other regulated digital assets. A phrase I have heard is RLN is the “Digital Banking Highway”.
Here is the website, at the bottom look at testimonials, read the names involved - regulatedliabilitynetwork.org/ - www.ukfinance.org.uk/regulated-liability-network
R3 works with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England, to name just two significant names. Past those names, you have all the usual large banks also involved. Where R3 has worked on Project Inthanon, Ubin, Jasper, Khokha, Jura, and Dunbar, this provides the bedrock to attempt this RLN project.
The UAE will be interesting as R3 has been selected as a tech partner for wholesale and retail CBDC.
When dealing with such high-level transactions there is also the need for confidentiality, not just in finance but healthcare, insurance, business arrangements and supply chain management.
R3 developed Conclave to help provide confidential computing, providing sanctuary for sensitive data with the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
Now, separately to R3, decentralised finance has exploded and captured a lot of value and attention. Vitalik Buterin led the way for Ethereum to dominate yet it does have issues with bottlenecks. There has been a rise in Layer-2s to help with the traffic.
The developers at R3, such as Cais Manai, Gavin Thomas, Tudor Malene and James Carlyle have gone to the lab and concocted a solution. This is TEN – The Encrypted Network. A Confidential Roll-Up. With all the expertise R3 has, it has been applied to help scale and encrypt Ethereum.
This can help with gaming, sealed auctions, private NFTs, prevent MEV, provide faster transactions and can help verify sensitive data without the host seeing it.
TEN will introduce session keys, this is good for gaming as it allows players to join without wallets or signing every transaction, significantly reducing on-boarding friction. That one example of how TEN benefits gaming.
In 2024, Corda was voted as 'Best Digital Finance - Solution' at the International Investor Awards.
As R3 is a consortium of banks and financial institutions you would expect to see people that work there with experience at all the big names. Allow me to demonstrate some of the faces that have worked at R3 in the past or still do:
Marcus van Abbé worked at the London Stock Exchange and the LSEG before moving to R3 as Head of Digital Market Infrastructure. He does point out in a piece for Ledger Insights that the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox is more open to technology companies than the EU DLT Pilot Regime. In terms of participation, Marcus says the UK has the edge over the EU as, “DSS’s inclusion of technology companies allows for greater collaboration between FMIs and new cutting-edge firms, fostering a more innovative environment.”
Here is his piece if you wish for further insight - www.ledgerinsights.com/comparing-the-uk-eu-approach-to-fostering-dlt-innovation/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-van-abb%C3%A9-a314b954/
Angie Walker worked at R3 and is now Global Head of Banking and Capital Markets at Chainlink www.linkedin.com/in/angie-walker-12190210/
Charlie Cooper worked at State Street, US Department of Defense and Deutsche Bank, he is a Senior Advisor at R3.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/charley-cooper-095a936/
Andrew Wilkinson is a developer who has been around Sky, WorldPay, established Galleon, advised Set Labs. He has recently joined Nash Point, which is an Onchain Banking System protocol claiming to be a new operating system for global credit markets. This is his twitter post on it x.com/davyjones0x/status/1841113462002397604 www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-d-wilkinson/
Kate Karimson is the CCO, her background is CME Group and ICAP.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-karimson/
Dan Newton was software developer analyst at Accenture, who are everywhere in consultancy and digital circles. Now he holds the Senior Staff Software Engineer role.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danknewton/
Dries Samyn was developer and lead architectural digital design at Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, and at Oliver Wyman. Now, Principal Software Engineer at R3.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dries-samyn/
Nicolas Horsley is Chief of Staff with a background with Kokoon, Kavanagh, Capgemini and Lloyds Banking Group.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolashorsley/
Marcy Dumitrescu worked for EU and Deloitte, now a Senior Product Manager.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcy-dumitrescu-386a6812a/
Omar Awad is the Senior Principal Engineer for R3, he was the VP Software Engineer at Goldman Sachs.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-awad-21349766/
John Shaw, former CPO, left R3 in April 2024. He held key roles at Microsoft and Sophos.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jetshaw/
Raphael Lui is a Senior Business Analyst for R3, his background is with Nomura, HSBC and DBS Bank.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-rafa-lui-5b8170201/
Jed Talvacchia left R3 after six years, he was Head of Corporate Development and the R3 Development Fund. Prior to this seat, he was at US DoJ, Federal Reserve Bank New York and at Goldman Sachs. He helped oversee the R3 Development fund.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jedtalvacchia/details/experience/
This fund helped stimulate Instimatch, a cash management platform for Money Markets (MM), Forex, eNotes, Repo and MM Funds. The founder, Hugh Macmillen, worked at the prestigious Coutts as a FX trader, and co-founded CLST, an institutional p2p lending platform.
Hugh’s Instimatch established a collaboration with Muqassa to provide the Instimatch Saudi Repo Trading Platform. Muqassa is the Securities Clearing Center Company for Saudi Arabia, a country where R3 has made an impact.
eMcREY is a Saudi tech solutions company, established 2005, and has influence across the MENA region with solutions for a range of industry, finance being one of them. They work with R3 to utilise the Corda platform; this is for the CBDC projects they conduct.
Saudi Arabia has an initiative called Vision 2030, within that SAMA (the Saudi Central Bank) has a CBDC sandbox with which R3 is very much involved. R3 worked on Project Aber, a cross-border experiment between Saudi and UAE.
There is the Digital Dirham of the UAE that R3 has been brought in to help. The goal is to provide a robust, secure, private, financial digitisation and Corda has been the way forward for UAE. UAE are ambitious, they want to be the global leading nation in the smart economy by 2071. 'UAE Blockchain Strategy 2021', aimed to conduct 50% of government transactions at the federal level using blockchain technology – I haven’t found any evidence if they succeeded. Abu Dhabi is the first capital city with 100% fibre-to-home connectivity.
R3 has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Qatar in 2023. Since then, the Digital Assets Lab, which is backed by Corda, has established 24 start-ups. The QFC and R3 are curating an environment that develops compliant, scalable blockchain applications that can be used across sectors, including real estate, finance, and DeFi. R3 facilitates training and provides the technology to accelerate digital assets in Qatar’s financial sector.
https://fintechnews.ae/22752/qatar/24-startups-join-qatars-digital-assets-lab/
The below image shows the ranking of most activity toward CBDC development and the Middle-East ranks number 1:
From the sun to the snow, the Middle-East links up with Switzerland, for example, there is the partnership between Dubai’s Crypto Oasis with Crypto Valley Association (CVA) in Zug. InCore Bank in Switzerland offers institutional-grade Ethereum staking to clients, some harking from the Middle-East. From 2019, Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS) was formed, a Swiss-based crypto brokerage for Arabic investors. The Taurus Group partnered with ABS to help tokenise assets and provide custody to clients from sandier realms.
A lot of this is underpinned by SIX Group who developed the SIX Digital Exchange aka SDX.
Type in “map.geo.admin.ch” and that should take you to Swisstopo’s 3D topography map of Switzerland. Swisstopo imbued many legacy databases and intel to make a precise 3D map of their country and its digital mountains.
Switzerland wants to bring digitisation to every level of life and as they are a key pillar to the financial system, what tends to happen on the pixelated slopes echoes across the world. See: digital.swiss/en/action-plan/
With trad-fi, trading and settlement are separate processes. SDX offers limited risk for their clients through the atomic settlement. SIX Group collaborates with JP Morgan and other financial institutions to explore tokenisation use cases such as repurchase agreements (repos).
SDX is fully regulated, SIX Group operates under the supervision of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), ensuring compliance with Swiss and international regulatory standards.
You may or may not remember, FINMA imposed strict conditions on Facebook’s LIBRA project, the project ended up dissolving.
Well, the partner that was crucial for bringing SDX to life was none other than R3 once again.
SDX uses R3’s Corda blockchain technology as it provided the high privacy, security, and scalability, that is necessary when dealing with institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure in digital asset markets. It can help to support the tokenisation of assets and manage their entire lifecycle, from issuance to trading and settlement.
And Switzerland has a close working relationship on digitisation with Singapore – see Project Mariana. In Singapore you can find DLT company called #dltledgers pivot from Hyperledger to R3. Cais Manai was Corda Developer Relation Lead and along with the R3 Consortium team from Singapore, he helped build out Thai-based JFIN blockchain. Whilst we speak of Thailand, R3 support their CBDC project. If you look up events in London, R3 is at every meet
Time and again, you will see R3 pop-up at key junctions of the digital asset space. It is positioned rather well to say the least. r3.com/use-cases/
The year is 2024 as I write this, October is the month. The way I see this cycle is the pro-core cycle, meaning there is professional emphasis to development that is coinciding with projects in crypto that have been maturing over the last few years.
This is where we are witnessing private banks and family offices open up crypto services to their clients, asset managers such as BlackRock are purchasing Bitcoin and providing BTC ETFs. Enterprises are going to utilise blockchain more and more because blockchain simply makes admin more efficient. Robin Hood exchange wants to provide crypto-assets to their customers, meanwhile, Coinbase wants to provide RWAs to their users and have Base become the global app store.
And it is not all going to happen at once, it has been an agenda for a while, and yet, just 2% of RWAs to come on-chain will flip the crypto market cap.
2017 on Ethereum was ICO-mania, a simple whitepaper with a half-decent website could see a market cap go to millions. Essentially, memecoins of today but with the pretence of utility.
Todd McDonald, R3 co-founder, spoke of the emergence of enterprise tokens. 2018 did see Security Tokens, however, these did not have the legal backing and fell through.
Early CordApps had a focus of Depository Receipt. The underlying asset may be in the same place but as it moves from one owner to another, the token is the receipt, the agreement and proof. Gold comes to mind.
Native Asset are where tokens is the asset, think bonds or equity.
With digital assets, items can be fractionalised therefore people can have part of an art painting or a piece of real estate. 2018 was perhaps too early but here we are in 2024 and BlackRock are telling their clients to buy Bitcoin and IX Swap - a DEX like Uniswap - is offering RWAs.
Cais Manai has said before that Corda offers “unique privacy, security, regulatory friendliness, strong identity layer, and tight integration with the existing financial system.” And we know that by now due to the fact Corda is used by SDX in Switzerland and everything else I have uttered.
Manai has been a part of Corda for a while, he has encouraged new developers at previous CordaCons, he has been active with CBDC projects, worked on digital payments and digital assets with R3 and now he is CEO of TEN.
Consider how much work R3 have done, there is much I have left out. TEN brings value to gaming. It can benefit DeFi protocols. It can help with day-to-day utility such as bills and insurance. One key factor is RWAs are going to be regulated space, it is hard to simply set up protocols that are allowed to sell RWAs as it takes time to earn licences. R3 are enmeshed with regulators, Corda is used widely across the globe and financial centres as it provides the features necessary for large volumes of wealth. This is not a simple thing to do. They deal with vast sums of wealth; it is a great responsibility.
And they are approaching crypto.
Which I see as a big opportunity.
TEN provides confidential computing for Ethereum, not only can it advance gaming in Web3, it is bridging Corda to Ethereum. It is bridging large pools of capital with the decentralised world.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there was a crossroads. Hearn went one way, Taaki another, Buterin walked his road. Each with a story to tell, each causing ripples across crypto and each with a legacy left behind. Here with TEN, there is a confluence of legitimate use mixing with confidentiality and an environment that allows allows permissionless dApps.
I have written a piece focused on TEN, I recommend to read that, I will leave the link below.
All in all, there is some insight into Corda and a prelude to TEN. Thank you for your time.
https://mirror.xyz/pcybe.eth/bL4qhveT5kBSBiuMdccdBRwrMRdI-s5cwsnN5MscbVA
Having an understanding of R3 will help provide reassurance on the standard of team working on TEN, the confidential roll-up that is encrypting Ethereum.
With any movement, any revolution, factions’ splinter and head in different directions.
Bitcoin is an intriguing revolution as it started on the internet and gradually made more noise in people’s everyday lives. Bitcoin is revolutionary because it is currency that needs miners and the internet, as it is a decentralised ledger it does not need central banks. You cannot stop it unless there is a solar flare, this remarkable arrangement of maths cannot be suppressed with violence.
I have heard the phrase that puts it well, fiat is controlled by governments, crypto is controlled by code.
In the beginning of Bitcoin there were factions on which direction it should go, allow me to be terse on the factions:
There is the faction that wanted to legitimise Bitcoin, make it appropriate for day-to-day payments and integrate with the day-to-day economy. This is the likes of Mike Hearn.
There is the side that wanted to stimulate an alternative economy whereby Bitcoin does not integrate with the central bank economy. Amir Taaki is perhaps the most infamous of the more anarchistic side of Bitcoin.
Finally, there were those that wanted to open up the scripting language and build on top of Bitcoin, there were things called Colored Coins and this was an attempt to have RWAs on top of Bitcoin. Buterin dived into the world of Bitcoin in 2011 and by the end of 2013 he initiated Ethereum.
My focus of this essay is towards CORDA by R3
Mike Hearn went on to work with R3 after David Rutter hired Richard Brown to assemble a team to build out DLT for banks. Globalisation happened with the use of paper; I have heard statistics that $50tn is moved around on paper.
What a wonderful thing paper is, how many books, memories, and life stories have traversed across time by someone simply putting ink to page. Yet, for management, it can be clumsy. The inherent characteristics of blockchain/DLT architecture and design provide properties like transparency, robustness, auditability, and instant settlement.
The business world is based on agreements. There was a dream where two people could enter a room, discuss the agreement and a computer device would store that agreement. Then along came DLT and it was possible to have an immutable ledger.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said, “What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.” Reducing transaction costs and risks does change the world, it speeds up transactions, it delivers information faster and more efficiently, those costs that would otherwise go on intermediary fees go back into the economy.
Traditional accounting systems rely on double-entry bookkeeping, where each transaction is recorded as a debit in one account and a credit in another, balancing the books. While double-entry accounting is a well-established method, it depends on the honesty and accuracy of the involved parties, making it susceptible to fraud or manipulation.
Now there is, triple-entry accounting, a system that adds a cryptographic layer that effectively creates a third ledger: a shared, immutable record of transactions signed and verified by both parties and, crucially, by a third-party cryptographic system.
Nick Szabo came up with smart contracts however, smart contracts were powerful but not accessible or interpretable by the legal community. Fellow cypherpunk Ian Grigg recognised this gap and came up with the Ricardian contract in 1995.
Grigg co-founded Systemics in the mid-90s, the company established a focus on building open-source financial cryptography systems, and Open Transactions was a framework for cryptographically secure, decentralised financial transactions, that Systemics incubated.
The Ricardian Contract was introduced as a method to encode contracts that could be digitally signed, verified, and stored, while still being legally enforceable.
This was a breakthrough as when organisations work together, the computer part of the agreement can be fault in the process, now it can help assure counter-party arrangements.
We have then the development of The Internet of Agreements (IoA). R3 is comprised of financial institutions getting together to collaborate and work towards methods to upgrade the financial plumbing.
Having a decentralised method, providing a trustless process, is great for collaboration and trust with counter-parties. Without a centre, the ledger is the same for all participants, transactions are cleared through blocks rather than clearing houses. Blockchains tend to get stronger with more participants as one entity is not in charge and the record is permanent, this is great for dispute settlement as well as instant settlement.
Furthermore, automation provided by smart contracts helps speed up processing of regulation. Each nation has various rules that can take time for intermediaries to iron out. With smart contracts and with AI getting stronger, there can be an accelerated way provided to deal with this.
Richard Brown, James Carlyle, Mike Hearn worked alongside Ian Grigg on the original R3 Corda whitepaper - docs.r3.com/en/pdf/corda-introductory-whitepaper.pdf
Corda is a permissioned network designed for a shared record of agreements between regulated financial institutions.
Corda has state object or state*.* It represents a specific agreement or contract, like a real-world contract.
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, transaction data is globally broadcasted. Corda has “Flow”. This is where the relevant shared transaction data (state objects) is provided to relevant involved parties but not broadcasted globally.
Corda is DLT not blockchain, it does not record into blocks. It has Notaries, a Notary is an entity that provides transaction ordering and timestamping services.
It has Cordapps, which, as you can guess, are apps built on Corda.
The industrial age and the Pax Americana post-World War 2 has helped accelerate globalisation. Corda is one progression of business and international co-operation, this is another phase of globalisation – Globalisation 2.0, if you will. There is an intention for a unified layer, something that can make it much faster and easier to abstract and transact between parties on a global level.
Here is a good graphic of some of Corda’s scope:
R3 work with banks and central authorities, this includes:
· Bank of Canada
· Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
· European Central Bank (ECB)
· Central Bank of Brazil
· South African Reserve Bank
· Bank of Thailand
· HSBC
· ING
· Barclays
· UBS
· Wells Fargo
· Credit Suisse
· BNP Paribas
· Deutsche Bank
· Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)
They work a broad range of supply chains, legal services, healthcare services, energy and commodity firms.
R3 are among the standard-setters in the DLT space. They even work on the RLN – The Regulated Liability Network. There is an RLN in USA and UK, it is a collaboration and a consortium, one which R3 plays a strong leadership role as it is applies the technological foundation. It is to help test and provide the infrastructure for various forms of digital money – stablecoins, CBDCs, commercial bank money, and other regulated digital assets. A phrase I have heard is RLN is the “Digital Banking Highway”.
Here is the website, at the bottom look at testimonials, read the names involved - regulatedliabilitynetwork.org/ - www.ukfinance.org.uk/regulated-liability-network
R3 works with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England, to name just two significant names. Past those names, you have all the usual large banks also involved. Where R3 has worked on Project Inthanon, Ubin, Jasper, Khokha, Jura, and Dunbar, this provides the bedrock to attempt this RLN project.
The UAE will be interesting as R3 has been selected as a tech partner for wholesale and retail CBDC.
When dealing with such high-level transactions there is also the need for confidentiality, not just in finance but healthcare, insurance, business arrangements and supply chain management.
R3 developed Conclave to help provide confidential computing, providing sanctuary for sensitive data with the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
Now, separately to R3, decentralised finance has exploded and captured a lot of value and attention. Vitalik Buterin led the way for Ethereum to dominate yet it does have issues with bottlenecks. There has been a rise in Layer-2s to help with the traffic.
The developers at R3, such as Cais Manai, Gavin Thomas, Tudor Malene and James Carlyle have gone to the lab and concocted a solution. This is TEN – The Encrypted Network. A Confidential Roll-Up. With all the expertise R3 has, it has been applied to help scale and encrypt Ethereum.
This can help with gaming, sealed auctions, private NFTs, prevent MEV, provide faster transactions and can help verify sensitive data without the host seeing it.
TEN will introduce session keys, this is good for gaming as it allows players to join without wallets or signing every transaction, significantly reducing on-boarding friction. That one example of how TEN benefits gaming.
In 2024, Corda was voted as 'Best Digital Finance - Solution' at the International Investor Awards.
As R3 is a consortium of banks and financial institutions you would expect to see people that work there with experience at all the big names. Allow me to demonstrate some of the faces that have worked at R3 in the past or still do:
Marcus van Abbé worked at the London Stock Exchange and the LSEG before moving to R3 as Head of Digital Market Infrastructure. He does point out in a piece for Ledger Insights that the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox is more open to technology companies than the EU DLT Pilot Regime. In terms of participation, Marcus says the UK has the edge over the EU as, “DSS’s inclusion of technology companies allows for greater collaboration between FMIs and new cutting-edge firms, fostering a more innovative environment.”
Here is his piece if you wish for further insight - www.ledgerinsights.com/comparing-the-uk-eu-approach-to-fostering-dlt-innovation/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-van-abb%C3%A9-a314b954/
Angie Walker worked at R3 and is now Global Head of Banking and Capital Markets at Chainlink www.linkedin.com/in/angie-walker-12190210/
Charlie Cooper worked at State Street, US Department of Defense and Deutsche Bank, he is a Senior Advisor at R3.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/charley-cooper-095a936/
Andrew Wilkinson is a developer who has been around Sky, WorldPay, established Galleon, advised Set Labs. He has recently joined Nash Point, which is an Onchain Banking System protocol claiming to be a new operating system for global credit markets. This is his twitter post on it x.com/davyjones0x/status/1841113462002397604 www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-d-wilkinson/
Kate Karimson is the CCO, her background is CME Group and ICAP.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-karimson/
Dan Newton was software developer analyst at Accenture, who are everywhere in consultancy and digital circles. Now he holds the Senior Staff Software Engineer role.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danknewton/
Dries Samyn was developer and lead architectural digital design at Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, and at Oliver Wyman. Now, Principal Software Engineer at R3.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dries-samyn/
Nicolas Horsley is Chief of Staff with a background with Kokoon, Kavanagh, Capgemini and Lloyds Banking Group.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolashorsley/
Marcy Dumitrescu worked for EU and Deloitte, now a Senior Product Manager.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcy-dumitrescu-386a6812a/
Omar Awad is the Senior Principal Engineer for R3, he was the VP Software Engineer at Goldman Sachs.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-awad-21349766/
John Shaw, former CPO, left R3 in April 2024. He held key roles at Microsoft and Sophos.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jetshaw/
Raphael Lui is a Senior Business Analyst for R3, his background is with Nomura, HSBC and DBS Bank.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-rafa-lui-5b8170201/
Jed Talvacchia left R3 after six years, he was Head of Corporate Development and the R3 Development Fund. Prior to this seat, he was at US DoJ, Federal Reserve Bank New York and at Goldman Sachs. He helped oversee the R3 Development fund.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jedtalvacchia/details/experience/
This fund helped stimulate Instimatch, a cash management platform for Money Markets (MM), Forex, eNotes, Repo and MM Funds. The founder, Hugh Macmillen, worked at the prestigious Coutts as a FX trader, and co-founded CLST, an institutional p2p lending platform.
Hugh’s Instimatch established a collaboration with Muqassa to provide the Instimatch Saudi Repo Trading Platform. Muqassa is the Securities Clearing Center Company for Saudi Arabia, a country where R3 has made an impact.
eMcREY is a Saudi tech solutions company, established 2005, and has influence across the MENA region with solutions for a range of industry, finance being one of them. They work with R3 to utilise the Corda platform; this is for the CBDC projects they conduct.
Saudi Arabia has an initiative called Vision 2030, within that SAMA (the Saudi Central Bank) has a CBDC sandbox with which R3 is very much involved. R3 worked on Project Aber, a cross-border experiment between Saudi and UAE.
There is the Digital Dirham of the UAE that R3 has been brought in to help. The goal is to provide a robust, secure, private, financial digitisation and Corda has been the way forward for UAE. UAE are ambitious, they want to be the global leading nation in the smart economy by 2071. 'UAE Blockchain Strategy 2021', aimed to conduct 50% of government transactions at the federal level using blockchain technology – I haven’t found any evidence if they succeeded. Abu Dhabi is the first capital city with 100% fibre-to-home connectivity.
R3 has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Qatar in 2023. Since then, the Digital Assets Lab, which is backed by Corda, has established 24 start-ups. The QFC and R3 are curating an environment that develops compliant, scalable blockchain applications that can be used across sectors, including real estate, finance, and DeFi. R3 facilitates training and provides the technology to accelerate digital assets in Qatar’s financial sector.
https://fintechnews.ae/22752/qatar/24-startups-join-qatars-digital-assets-lab/
The below image shows the ranking of most activity toward CBDC development and the Middle-East ranks number 1:
From the sun to the snow, the Middle-East links up with Switzerland, for example, there is the partnership between Dubai’s Crypto Oasis with Crypto Valley Association (CVA) in Zug. InCore Bank in Switzerland offers institutional-grade Ethereum staking to clients, some harking from the Middle-East. From 2019, Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS) was formed, a Swiss-based crypto brokerage for Arabic investors. The Taurus Group partnered with ABS to help tokenise assets and provide custody to clients from sandier realms.
A lot of this is underpinned by SIX Group who developed the SIX Digital Exchange aka SDX.
Type in “map.geo.admin.ch” and that should take you to Swisstopo’s 3D topography map of Switzerland. Swisstopo imbued many legacy databases and intel to make a precise 3D map of their country and its digital mountains.
Switzerland wants to bring digitisation to every level of life and as they are a key pillar to the financial system, what tends to happen on the pixelated slopes echoes across the world. See: digital.swiss/en/action-plan/
With trad-fi, trading and settlement are separate processes. SDX offers limited risk for their clients through the atomic settlement. SIX Group collaborates with JP Morgan and other financial institutions to explore tokenisation use cases such as repurchase agreements (repos).
SDX is fully regulated, SIX Group operates under the supervision of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), ensuring compliance with Swiss and international regulatory standards.
You may or may not remember, FINMA imposed strict conditions on Facebook’s LIBRA project, the project ended up dissolving.
Well, the partner that was crucial for bringing SDX to life was none other than R3 once again.
SDX uses R3’s Corda blockchain technology as it provided the high privacy, security, and scalability, that is necessary when dealing with institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure in digital asset markets. It can help to support the tokenisation of assets and manage their entire lifecycle, from issuance to trading and settlement.
And Switzerland has a close working relationship on digitisation with Singapore – see Project Mariana. In Singapore you can find DLT company called #dltledgers pivot from Hyperledger to R3. Cais Manai was Corda Developer Relation Lead and along with the R3 Consortium team from Singapore, he helped build out Thai-based JFIN blockchain. Whilst we speak of Thailand, R3 support their CBDC project. If you look up events in London, R3 is at every meet
Time and again, you will see R3 pop-up at key junctions of the digital asset space. It is positioned rather well to say the least. r3.com/use-cases/
The year is 2024 as I write this, October is the month. The way I see this cycle is the pro-core cycle, meaning there is professional emphasis to development that is coinciding with projects in crypto that have been maturing over the last few years.
This is where we are witnessing private banks and family offices open up crypto services to their clients, asset managers such as BlackRock are purchasing Bitcoin and providing BTC ETFs. Enterprises are going to utilise blockchain more and more because blockchain simply makes admin more efficient. Robin Hood exchange wants to provide crypto-assets to their customers, meanwhile, Coinbase wants to provide RWAs to their users and have Base become the global app store.
And it is not all going to happen at once, it has been an agenda for a while, and yet, just 2% of RWAs to come on-chain will flip the crypto market cap.
2017 on Ethereum was ICO-mania, a simple whitepaper with a half-decent website could see a market cap go to millions. Essentially, memecoins of today but with the pretence of utility.
Todd McDonald, R3 co-founder, spoke of the emergence of enterprise tokens. 2018 did see Security Tokens, however, these did not have the legal backing and fell through.
Early CordApps had a focus of Depository Receipt. The underlying asset may be in the same place but as it moves from one owner to another, the token is the receipt, the agreement and proof. Gold comes to mind.
Native Asset are where tokens is the asset, think bonds or equity.
With digital assets, items can be fractionalised therefore people can have part of an art painting or a piece of real estate. 2018 was perhaps too early but here we are in 2024 and BlackRock are telling their clients to buy Bitcoin and IX Swap - a DEX like Uniswap - is offering RWAs.
Cais Manai has said before that Corda offers “unique privacy, security, regulatory friendliness, strong identity layer, and tight integration with the existing financial system.” And we know that by now due to the fact Corda is used by SDX in Switzerland and everything else I have uttered.
Manai has been a part of Corda for a while, he has encouraged new developers at previous CordaCons, he has been active with CBDC projects, worked on digital payments and digital assets with R3 and now he is CEO of TEN.
Consider how much work R3 have done, there is much I have left out. TEN brings value to gaming. It can benefit DeFi protocols. It can help with day-to-day utility such as bills and insurance. One key factor is RWAs are going to be regulated space, it is hard to simply set up protocols that are allowed to sell RWAs as it takes time to earn licences. R3 are enmeshed with regulators, Corda is used widely across the globe and financial centres as it provides the features necessary for large volumes of wealth. This is not a simple thing to do. They deal with vast sums of wealth; it is a great responsibility.
And they are approaching crypto.
Which I see as a big opportunity.
TEN provides confidential computing for Ethereum, not only can it advance gaming in Web3, it is bridging Corda to Ethereum. It is bridging large pools of capital with the decentralised world.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there was a crossroads. Hearn went one way, Taaki another, Buterin walked his road. Each with a story to tell, each causing ripples across crypto and each with a legacy left behind. Here with TEN, there is a confluence of legitimate use mixing with confidentiality and an environment that allows allows permissionless dApps.
I have written a piece focused on TEN, I recommend to read that, I will leave the link below.
All in all, there is some insight into Corda and a prelude to TEN. Thank you for your time.
https://mirror.xyz/pcybe.eth/bL4qhveT5kBSBiuMdccdBRwrMRdI-s5cwsnN5MscbVA
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
No activity yet