R3 CEV, the U.S.-based financial innovation firm, announced the successful 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 multiple cloud technology providers within R3’s Global Collaborative Lab.

“This development further supports R3's belief that close collaboration among global financial institutions and technology providers will create significant momentum behind the adoption of distributed ledger solutions across the industry”, said David Rutter, CEO of R3, in a statement.

The banks connected to R3-managed private distributed ledger technologies built by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel. The strengths and weaknesses of each technology were assessed by running smart contracts programmed to facilitate issuance, secondary trading and redemption of commercial paper.

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

The R3 member banks involved in this trial included Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BMO Financial Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, CIBC, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ING Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, J.P. Morgan, Macquarie Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Natixis, Nordea, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, SEB, Societe Generale, State Street, TD Bank Group, UBS, UniCredit, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and Westpac Banking Corporation.

R3 CEV announced the successful completion of first blockchain experiment with 11 consortium member banks in January. The participating members were connected on an R3-managed private P2P distributed ledger, based on Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in an accelerated development environment. They successfully executed financial transactions instantaneously across the global private network. They simulated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger without the need for a centralized third party.