Corda is open for business. Each day, more students and recent graduates contribute towards the growing ecosystem around the enterprise-grade platform built by R3 and it’s development community.
Technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs from universities have invigorated the community with fresh perspectives, thought-leadership, and ideas for businesses. Some highlights of student-driven outputs from the first quarter of 2018 include:
The quarter also involved many visits and discussions (Brown, Fordham, Yale, Temple), several Harvard in Tech events at our NY office, along with collaborations on dozens of academic papers with students around the world.
From a Research perspective, we have been impressed by the breadth of theses explored by the university community. The range of topics is endless – we would love to see authors continue to address questions such as:
Further, our university engagement and research focuses on addressing real world business problems – the end aim is commercialization. For example, each one of our last two university projects have spawned companies building on Corda.
The easier it is for start-ups with good ideas to be successful, the better off the ecosystem will be as the number of start-ups grows. Many of the companies currently live or soon to go live on Corda are established players, though the health of the ecosystem will also come from the disruptive, small, risk-taking ISVs – the type of company that comes out of universities. R3 lowers the the barriers of entry for these start-ups by providing a common base platform for companies to build solutions on top of.
The solutions we have seen built on Corda are unique in the blockchain space – they are strictly driven by those that aim to build sustainable enterprise solutions. They are not retail-focused gambling apps, “cool idea” ICOs launched from a whitepaper with 10-15 misspellings on the first page, or scams created by those intending to flip their coins to grandmas. They are credible businesses from entrepreneurs that care about value creation and delivery, customer demand, bringing greater efficiencies to cross-company information sharing and interactions, and driving commerce with fewer intermediaries. The R3 community is driven solely by meaningful work for the enterprise.
There is a 12-18 month runway for most start-ups – we are happy and proud that many entrepreneurs and thought-leaders among university students and recent graduates are embracing and working alongside the R3 community. It is a testament to the original vision of Corda (see here and here), and the continued execution of that vision.
How can you get involved?