by Todd McDonald
A Retirement (of sorts)
Welcome to one of the final installments of the now quite-irregular Weekend Read. I will be mothballing this blog series in the coming weeks due to the fact that I am clearly too biased to write a mostly-neutral news summary.
When this series began back almost two and a half years ago (featuring perhaps the best meme I ever found), we at R3 (with ‘we’ being only me, Dave and Jesse!) and many in the financial services industry were in ‘explore mode’…trying to make sense of all things DLT. Fast forward to today, and those many months of exploration have clearly led us and our customers to decide that Corda is the answer for financial services, and potentially for all of commerce. That well earned bias has made it harder and harder to share and comment on the other efforts in the industry in an even-handed way.
But fret not! If you would like to be kept up to date on the news items of the day, please contact us as we are in the midst of putting together a more frequent whiz-bang newsletter for sharing useful links to our wider community.
Speaking of the R3 community, please reach out to our Partner team if you would like to join our ever-growing community of builders on Corda. We would love to have a conversation to show how you can build value and get to market with your applications (CorDapps). Or just head over to corda.net and get started! But don’t just take it from us…stop by this Wednesday at Consensus for a panel called Building on Corda, where you can hear directly from partners like Cognizant and Calypso Technologies on what they are building, and the flexible models they have on how they will be going to market. (Spoiler Alert: unlike other platforms out there, we aren’t requiring partners to deploy their apps on a single “Mainframe-Cloud” network…)
Lots and Lots of Links
Here is an incomplete eight week inventory of links to help clear my Pocket queue:
REG-ISH
- An R3 welcome to Abu Dhabi Global Market! : Abu Dhabi Global Market joins R3
- And another R3 welcome to the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF)!: Quebec AMF Fintech Initiatives: Fintech Lab And Partnership With R3
- ISDA AGM: Welcome to the new Isda – more ambitious than the old one (plus video of the Market Innovation And Technology panel)
- CFTC Rolling Out a Fintech Innovation Office
- FCA: Discussion Paper on distributed ledger technology
- IBM, R3 and Axoni discuss DTCC blockchain project and DTCC envisions single global ledger for transaction reporting
- Netting no problem for blockchain, tech firms tell regulators
COINING IT
- The Economist: The market in Initial Coin Offerings risks becoming a bubble
- The FT: Crypto currency offerings spur speculation frenzy
- WSJ: How a Bitcoin Clone Helped a Company Raise $12 Million in 12 Minutes
OLD SCHOOL
- J.P. Morgan Set to Run First Apps in Public Cloud
- Thomson Reuters: The impact of blockchain on financial services
- Matt Levine: Blockchain blockchain blockchain blockchain.
- The Economist: Financial technology is proving less of a battleground than feared
- HBR: How Banks Can Compete Against an Army of Fintech Startups
BUILDERS
- Microsoft Unveils New Framework to Speed Up Blockchain PoCs (For more info on Corda multi-node deployment please see this MS blog post and get Corda docs here)
- Cobalt attracts top currency traders to blockchain service
- Ripple moves to further decentralize RCL and announces plans to place 55 bio XRP in escrow
- Why Project Indy is Using Hybrid DLT to Rethink Digital Identity
OPINIONS ETC
- The Blockchain Immutability Myth by Gideon Greenspan
- Streetwise Professor: The Unintended Consequences of Blockchain Are Not Unpredictable: Respond Now Rather Than Repent Later