Press Release

Blog by David E. Rutter: CordaCon 2018

CordaCon 2018 – thank you for being part of it.

By David E. Rutter

 

The rubber has met the road.  The adoption of blockchain technology to rewire the way the world does business is now an inevitability, and while the timing will depend on the market and sector, the trajectory is clear.

We just spent last week hosting the fall 2018 CordaCon in London, and it was, literally, standing room only for both the Developer Day and Business Day. The event saw over 1,100 coders, business leaders and cross-industry professionals descend on London to explore the latest offerings on Corda and share their own experiences with the platform.  It was electric.

CordaCon is now in its third year and has grown from a small community of those closest to the platform’s development into an industry-leading event catering to professionals from around the globe working to apply blockchain technology to their sectors.  And what makes it so special is that the presentations, demos and discussions were led not just by the developers at R3, but by our partners and clients who are now seeing real world successes built on the Corda platform.

Development on Corda is happening now, with many live apps in production, and hundreds of firms and thousands of technologists engaged as part of the R3 community to solve a multitude of problems across various industries.  Scores of real business case studies and demos were shown at CordaCon, and their stories were told by the users themselves.  We debated current challenges and discussed plans for the future.

As one of the highlights of the event, we launched Marketplace – a new channel for the R3 Ecosystem.

It offers a directory of over 200 organizations focused on harnessing the power of Corda, and helps you in discovering, building and deploying solutions built on our platform. At launch, Marketplace had over 50 applications solving specific problems across several industries, including trading precious metals, streamlining property valuation, trading high quality liquid assets more efficiently, self-sovereign identity and much more.

When three years ago we started this journey to take the potential of blockchain technology and apply its benefits to real business, we knew there would be challenges ahead.  Then, and to a lesser extent now, the industry’s imagination was captured by public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum.  We chose a different path, and the tough choices we made around critical issues such as privacy, security, scalability, integration and others led us to design Corda by taking the best of early blockchain technology and improving upon it to suit the needs of global business.

And the dividends are paying off. Corda is now seen as the blockchain platform that gets the job done. This is blockchain machine-tooled for business. This is the right model and the right technology, built collaboratively by the right people.

Our technology team – led by Mike Hearn and Richard Gendal Brown, are some of the finest software engineers of their generation who built Corda not in isolation, but working in lockstep with our broader client base representing diverse industries and geographies as diverse as the world itself.

Above all, CordaCon reminded everyone that the developer and business communities are making Corda the blockchain platform of choice for business.

So, what’s next? We are preparing to release version 4.0 of the Corda platform, delivering powerful enhancements to Corda Enterprise and Corda open source. You will soon hear much more about Corda Network, so stay tuned.  R3 Marketplace will expand from a showcase to a full app store for CorDapps, supporting more partner solutions and an ever-growing directory of organizations that can help you build and deploy your own CorDapp. And that’s just the beginning…

In the coming weeks, the video from CordaCon will be posted for those of you that weren’t able to make it or squeeze into the sessions.  In the meantime, visit our website at https://r3.com and listen to our “Life in the Fast Chain” podcast.

Thank you for being part of our journey, and get ready for all that’s to come.