R3 ends “first of its kind” blockchain trial with 40 banks

Written by Antony Peyton
3rd March 2016

David Rutter, CEO of R3 CEV

New York-based R3 CEV has finished its trial of five distinct blockchain technologies in parallel in the “first test of its kind”.

The trial represented the trading of fixed income assets between 40 of the world’s “largest” banks across the blockchains, using cloud technology providers within R3’s Global Collaborative Lab.

The banks, including Barclays, Deutsche and HSBC, connected to the R3-managed private distributed ledger technologies built by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel.

In the testing, they “evaluated the strengths and weaknesses” of each technology by running smart contracts programmed to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemption of commercial paper, a short-term fixed income security typically issued by corporations to raise funding.

Each of the distributed ledgers ran a smart contract based on identical business logic to enable the banks to “accurately compare” the difference in performance between them.

Cloud computing resources were provided by Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix and Amazon AWS to host the distributed ledgers.

David Rutter, CEO of R3, says these technologies represent a “new frontier of innovation” and will “dramatically improve” the way the financial services industry operates.

He likened this latest development to the advent of electronic trading decades ago, which “delivered huge advancements in efficiency, transparency, scalability and security”.

R3 will continue to work with the banks in its Global Collaborative Lab over the coming months to test and develop applications based on distributed ledger technology.

The R3 member banks involved in this trial included: