Bringing Corda Enterprise to IBM LinuxONE and IBM Cloud via IBM Hyper Protect Services

According to a recent HSBC report¹, the volume of tokenized assets, across all asset classes, has the potential to reach $15tr in value by 2025, based on the current rate of growth.

R3 customers are already taking advantage of Corda’s end-to-end digital asset lifecycle management capabilities, and the expanding Corda ecosystem of financial market participants, regulators, technology service providers and multi-national corporations.

At CordaCon this week you’ll see the progress of transformational initiatives using digital assets on Corda–from tokenization in private placements, to groundbreaking work underway to deliver the digital exchanges of the future, and Central Bank Digital Currencies.

The technology maturity, its adoption by businesses, and its acceptance by authorities, brings us to a point where delivering enterprise grade, regulated, digital assets at scale are now a reality. The arrival of Corda Enterprise on IBM LinuxONE and IBM Cloud via IBM Hyper Protect Services is another example of how R3 continues to drive the industry forward with the ecosystem.

Demand for enterprise grade digital assets

From Mastercard and Wells Fargo, to SDX and Nasdaq–the world of regulated digital assets is increasingly choosing Corda.

As the digital assets marketplace grows, so does the need for secure, scalable, enterprise-grade infrastructure to provide the privacy, resilience, and performance that businesses in highly regulated industries demand.

R3 is not new to forming strong partnerships with industry leaders to ensure we address customer demand–from our long-standing strategic partnerships with infrastructure and service providers, to our technical work to integrate with leading HSM providers. It is vital that we continue to provide a broad set of deployment options for the Corda ecosystem. And that means ensuring that we can combine Corda with other best-of-breed solutions to meet customers’ evolving business requirements.

Corda Enterprise on IBM LinuxONE

The availability of a new open beta program by R3 and IBM will give our joint customers access to the platform-level security of IBM LinuxONE with Corda Enterprise’s privacy, enterprise-grade digital assets, and high-performance attributes. This means an end-to-end solution they can deploy in their own data centers, and in the IBM Cloud via IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services.

As customers seek faster time-to-value for enterprise-grade blockchain initiatives the solution will bring together best-in-class security, performance and scalability features for digital asset applications and hybrid cloud deployments–enabling customers to run their most sensitive workloads with transparency, trust, and flexibility.

Driven by the market

Today, 44 of the world’s top 50 banks run IBM Z according to IBM. The design principles of IBM Z–those of security, scalability, resiliency and performance–align well with the design principles of Corda Enterprise. With Corda’s presence in regulated markets, a space IBM Z clients have long existed in, IBM seeks to bring increased choice to its clients working in digital assets with Corda Enterprise on IBM Z and LinuxONE, in a world of hybrid cloud.

One such customer is Hex Trust–Asia’s leading digital asset custodian, providing a turnkey digital asset platform for financial institutions.

Hex Trust chose Corda Enterprise because of its privacy model, ability to create custom consensus rules, and the standardized way it represents digital assets on ledger. Combined with Hex Trust’s use of IBM LinuxONE, the end-to-end solution will provide a highly secure digital asset custody infrastructure for the banking industry–protecting private keys and securing workflows.

Rebecca Gott, Distinguished Engineer at IBM, said: “R3 Corda Enterprise customers deploying to IBM LinuxONE Hyper Protect Digital Assets Platform can be assured their data and private keys are accessible only to them. We use technology to enforce that those with elevated system credentials cannot access your data or keys, at rest, in-flight or while in use. Additionally, IBM and R3 customers will see the performance benefits of using Corda Enterprise with LinuxONE’s on-chip acceleration for encryption and optimization of Java workloads. We’re excited to work with our customers to realize the benefits of running their Corda Enterprise workloads on IBM LinuxONE.”

IBM further highlights how the collaboration will address customer demand for flexibility, choice and security here.

Voice of the Corda ecosystem

Ivno is a provider of digital cash and collateral solutions designed for institutional use is looking forward to the new offering: “Corda Enterprise deployment on IBM’s LinuxONE is another exciting step forward within the Corda ecosystem. Specifically it stands to augment CorDapps such as Ivno that require secure, resilient, and performant node-hosting strategies; ultimately benefiting the wider Corda client base,” said Ryan Gledhill, CTO, Ivno.

DASL is a flexible, advanced technology solution designed to enable the future of financial services. Built on Corda Enterprise, it brings together sell-side firms, liquidity venues, clearing / settlement firms, market data providers, buy-side firms and inter-dealer brokers. “The release of Corda Enterprise on LinuxONE offers an end-to-end platform to deploy resilient digital assets applications and networks built on Corda, with highly secure infrastructure from IBM. We are delighted to be able to show clients DASL running on LinuxONE, providing a cost-effective solution to security and stability for their digital assets,” said Richard Crook, CEO, DASL.

What’s next?

Corda Enterprise 4.6 is now available for download to LinuxONE and IBM Cloud as a beta release and tech preview here. A general release in 2021 will run Corda 5–the next major version of the Corda platform.

IBM Global Services new R3 Center of Excellence

Equally exciting is the announcement that IBM Global Services, IBM’s professional services organization has also established a new R3 Center of Excellence, focused on providing services to IBM clients that have–or plan to adopt–applications built on Corda Enterprise.

The R3 Center of Excellence will include trained and Corda-certified solution architects, strategy and design consultants, SME’s, and a delivery pool that can quickly engage to help our joint customers advance their Corda Enterprise network and solution deployments.

In addition, IBM will use the R3 Center of Excellence to innovate and incubate customer ideas and use cases leveraging IBM’s deep expertise in developing and standing up commercially available production-grade blockchain networks.

Next steps

If you are building a solution on Corda and are interested in Corda Enterprise on IBM LinuxONE and IBM Cloud, access the tech preview here.

If you registered for CordaCon 2020, additional information can be found in the below sessions which are available on demand to watch.

1. R3 and IBM Join Forces to Expand Blockchain Capabilities
2. Enterprise Grade Infrastructure for Digital Assets with Rafal Czerniawski, Chief Executive Officer at Hex Trust, Rebecca Gott, Distinguished Engineer at IBM and Dave Hudson, Chief Engineering Officer at R3.

[1] Paper references World Economic Forum research as foundation for predictions