R3, the financial innovation company that runs blockchain consortium, announced that it’s open-source, financial-grade, distributed ledger platform ‘Corda’ has entered into first public beta.

The release of the public beta represents a step forward in the path of Corda, towards API stabilization for production applications. The announcement was first made by Richard Gendal Brown, Chief Technology Officer of R3, last week.

“This beta is an important milestone. It represents the last major checkpoint before we stabilize our APIs and announce full version 1.0. Unlike some other codebases, “1.0” means something very significant to us: it will be the point at which we commit to API compatibility,” Brown stated.

In addition to the public beta, the team has also decided to add CollectSignaturesFlow which factors out a lot of code which CorDapp developers needed to write to get their transactions signed. Also, classpath scanning to wire-up flows automatically, is being introduced. These decisions follows after carefully considering feedback from numerous training courses and meet-ups.

“We’ve been proving Corda with our members on our TestNet, the world’s first long-running, permissioned, general purpose distributed ledger network. And we plan to open this up to everybody in the coming months,” he added.

Last week, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced its partnership with R3 last week, to bring its open source platform Corda to Mission Critical HPE Systems. The collaboration between HPE and R3 intends to bring blockchain to the workloads in order to run at enterprise scale.