THE WEEKEND READ: JAN 22

In the words of the ancient philosopher D.L. Roth, “I heard you missed us. We’re back!” Actually, I haven’t really heard that, but we are back anyway. A few programming notes before we start: it has been a while since the last post, but if you read the fine print of the title carefully, it is called “Weekend” and not “Weekly” read…so our only promise to the reader is to delivery a few interesting links stitched together with snarky learned prose and random jpegs during any weekend hours, and not necessarily every weekend…with that, onto the links.

News in the Spotlight: DTCC Trade Information Warehouse

We were very excited to announce earlier this month our collaboration with DTCC, IBM and Axoni, along with a large subset of our member banks, in implementing a distributed ledger solution as a piece of market infrastructure (in this case, DTCC’s Trade Information Warehouse). This project encapsulates a lot of the themes that have driven R3’s approach over the last few years, such as collaboration, focusing on the problem and a desire to move to a shared truth across the industry. The last phrase “across the industry” is important. If we are lucky enough to be successful with this implementation, we must ensure that this new piece of market infrastructure fits in and interoperates across the new “financial market operating system” that we and other firms are working hard to implement. Over the coming weeks, R3 will be speaking more about our efforts in this space and will walk through our Platform and Services strategy in more detail.

A few other related notes. A belated congratulations to the Axoni team for closing their latest round of funding. And I may be most proud of being part of an effort that got mentioned in the column of the king of informed snark, Matt Levine: “But as I often say when I read these stories: You could just have a list.” I would kindly point Mr. Levine to Richard Brown’s recent post for the answer: On distributed databases and distributed ledgers

R3 Updates

Our team just completed a very successful week in Asia, which started with our first Members Conference based in Asia, hosted in Hong Kong by our friends at AIA. R3’s Tim Grant then had the chance to inform the crowd at Next Money Fintech HK that 2017 is “The Year of the Pilot” (pic below) as everyone runs hard and fast at production implementations. We also hosted successful Corda meet ups in Seoul, Tokyo and Singapore (pic below) to round out the week.

For those who would like to stay up to date with our Corda meetup schedule, please visit our Meetup page. Our next R3 hosted event will be in NYC on Friday, February 10 at the NYC HQ of our friends at Rise (sign up here). And we are pleased to see other meetups pop up that are led by the wider community, like this one in Vancouver. For those attending the upcoming Construct event, make sure to reach out to R3’s Michael Dowling and Clemens Wan (aka Clembot).

Also a belated welcome to our friends at Credicorp to R3 as our first Spanish-speaking Latin American member! We have other announcements in the hopper, including new regulatory members, that we will be sharing in the coming weeks.

A Bunch of Links

One last thing. As we (hopefully!) mature as an industry, the weekly news items of “imagine if!” and “blockchain explained!” articles should get less relevant and definitely less interesting. So back at Blog HQ (my attic), we are thinking about how we could change our (somewhat) weekly(ish) updates so that they keep pace with people’s interest and focus. So please let us know (on LinkedIn or Twitter or directly) your views, we want to hear them. Cheers.