R3 announces successful completion of distributed ledger experiment involving 11 large financial bodies

Fintech innovation firm R3 CEV announced in a press release last week that a ground-breaking distributed ledger experiment involving eleven of the world’s largest financial institutions had been successfully completed.

In the experiment, R3 and the banks – Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit, and Wells Fargo – each connected on an R3-managed private P2P distributed ledger, supported by Ehtereum technology and hosted on a VPN in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform that offers Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) in an accelerated development environment, said the press release.

The fintech innovation company and the financial bodies were then able to explore the technology’s potential to carry out financial transactions instantly across the global private network, according to the release. R3 said that the banks imitated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger without the requirement for a centralized third party.

The cooperative experiment was the first in a series of projects, which, like the first, will use an assortment of prospective distributed ledger technologies. The first was designed to prove suitability of distributed ledgers for financial markets use cases. Over the course of 2016, R3 will be leading a series of more projects borne out of its collaborative lab workshops, said the release.

R3 CEO David Rutter said in the release, “The transition from vision and hypothesis to application and execution signifies the next major step towards using this technology to transform how institutions interact, report and trade with each other in financial markets. This is a very exciting development, both for R3 and our member banks, as well as the global financial services industry as a whole.”

R3 launched its distributed ledger consortium in September 2015. Since then, the firm has been running industry cooperative joint working groups with its 42 member banks to design and deploy the innovative shared ledger technology in the international financial sector, integrating numerous open source technologies and standards.

Image via R3’s earlier press release