R3 blockchain consortium is latest hot topic in the financial and cryptocurrency system. Several leading banks joined the consortium over the course of past few months, bringing the number to 42 in December. R3 now plans on broader engagement with a diverse range of institutions outside of the banking industry.
In a blog post entitled 'It's New year...time to change the world' R3 managing director and CTO Richard Gendal Brown announced last week that the company is hiring talented and motivated professionals to “turn our vision into a reality".
Brown posted some interesting questions directed towards the interested applicants. The questions ask whether the applicant has experience of banking technology and a passion for blockchain technology; an understanding of why it is difficult to change anything in a bank; an understanding of why Bitcoin works the way it does; whether they can explain why $100 at Chase is different to $100 at Wells Fargo and lastly and quite importantly:
“Do you have a passion to transform the world of finance by applying insights from the worlds of cryptography, blockchain technology and distributed systems?”
Moreover, Brown also touched on the topic of blockchain implementation and said that the maturation of cryptographic techniques, demonstrated in part by blockchain technology, provides a new opportunity: the possibility of authoritative systems of record that are securely shared between firms.
This in turn makes the way to implement new shared platforms for the recording of financial events and fosters a system where a single global logical ledger is authoritative for agreements between firms recorded on it, even though the relationships and obligations recorded remain between those firms.
“I believe successful, transformational, large-scale deployments of shared ledger technologies in finance depend on the adoption of an architecture that is designed from the ground up to address the functional and non-functional requirements of banks”, Brown added.
