R3, the U.S.-based financial innovation firm, announced on Wednesday the successful completion of a landmark distributed ledger experiment that involved 11 of the world’s largest financial institutions – Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo.
According to the press release, R3 and member banks of the consortium 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.
The participating banks 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.
David Rutter, CEO of R3, commented: “The transition from vision and hypothesis to application and execution signifies the next major step towards using this technology to transform how institutions interact, report and trade with each other in financial markets. This is a very exciting development, both for R3 and our member banks, as well as the global financial services industry as a whole.”
The experiment marks the beginning of a series of projects that aim to prove suitability of distributed ledgers for financial markets use cases. R3 will be announcing additional projects stemming from its collaborative lab workshops over the course of 2016.
“As we progress our evaluations of shared ledgers and smart contracts, we look forward to leveraging R3’s lab environment for collaborative technology experiments,” said Brad Novak, Chief Technology Officer for the Investment Bank at Barclays. “Ethereum is a well-known open source technology in this space and we also look forward to collaborative experiments using other technologies.”
