Microsoft’s Project Bletchley has announced the availability of R3’s Corda on Azure, an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform.

The announcement follows Corda’s release to the open source community last month. Corda is a financial grade distributed ledger that records, executes and manages institutions’ financial agreements in perfect synchrony with their peers. It was built in close collaboration with over 70 banks and financial institutions and is already by far the biggest collaborative effort of its kind in the distributed ledger space.

Some of Corda’s key design choices include:

• Designed for Business: Recording and management of financial transactions, within existing legal and regulatory frameworks
• Privacy First: Data sharing restricted to entitled participants of a transaction
• Modular Consensus: Support for multiple consensus algorithms

“With the addition of Corda to Project Bletchley, we continue to expand our distributed ledger platform support on Azure to enable the next generation of distributed business applications”, Christine Avanessians Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Azure, said.

According to the official announcement, R3 has published a virtual machine image in the Azure Marketplace to easily and quickly deploy a multi-member Corda demo network on a single VM.  This offering demonstrates the capabilities of Corda through real world scenarios, including an interest rate swap deal and Standard Initial Margin Model (SIMM) valuation. This is the first click-stop of many towards R3’s financial-grade distributed ledger platform offering on Azure.

“Corda is a distributed ledger platform designed from the ground up to record, manage and synchronize financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios.  By making simple Corda demos available on the Azure Marketplace, R3 and Microsoft are making it easy for newcomers to experience Corda for themselves before joining the community”, Richard G Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, said.