R3, the financial innovation company that runs blockchain consortium, announced that it has made its blockchain platform – Corda – open source. Its source code is accessible to the global developer community to encourage collaboration, review, and contribution to the platform.

The Corda platform is a financial grade distributed ledger that captures the benefits of blockchain systems. It records, executes and manages financial agreements of the institution in perfect synchrony with their peers, the release stated.  The platform restricts access to data within an agreement to only those who need to validate it. Corda’s financial agreements take the form of smart contracts by linking business logic and data with associated legal prose, which will make sure that the agreements on the platform are rooted firmly in law.

“The successful application of distributed ledger technology to financial services relies on new solutions being able to integrate and work seamlessly with each other, otherwise the disjointed infrastructure financial markets are forced to operate with today will simply be replicated with different technology. The applications being built therefore need to be based on common, open, interoperable platforms – much like the common protocols on which the internet operates today. Open sourcing Corda is the next step in making Corda one of these platforms,” David Rutter, CEO of R3 said.

In order to access the blockchain platform, developers can download its source code at Corda.net. The “Get Corda” link on the front page, will give the public repository on GitHub with instructions on how to set up the platform. Non-developers can also get resources from the website, including an introduction to Corda, documentation, a blog and a discussion forum enabling interaction with the R3 team.

Last month, R3 announced that Corda will go open source and that the platform aims to develop banking solutions and represents the shared effort among banks, insurers, fund managers and others in order to explore the potentials of blockchain technology in financial markets. Calypso Technology, a provider of innovative cross-asset front-to-back technology solutions for complex financial markets, will be developing capital markets application on R3 Corda blockchain platform.