R3 will soon be open-sourcing Corda. Here’s what to expect.
As head of Technolgoy Richard Brown confirmed a few months back, R3’s Corda platform will be open-sourced, under the Apache 2 licence, on November 30, 2016.
Here’s what he said more recently:
Corda is a distributed ledger platform designed and built from the ground up for the recording and automation of legal agreements between identifiable parties. It is heavily influenced by the requirements of the financial industry but we believe the community will find the underlying architecture will lend itself to a broad range of applications.
R3 say they built Corda because they see requirements – particularly in finance – that need a distributed ledger but which cannot be met by existing platforms.
- Corda is the only Distributed Ledger platform designed by the world’s largest financial institutions to manage legal agreements on an automatable and enforceable basis.
- Corda only shares data with those with a need to view or validate it; there is no global broadcasting of data across the network.
- Corda is the only Distributed Ledger platform to support multiple consensus providers employing different consensus algorithms on the same network, enabling compliance with local regulations.
- Corda is designed to provide a great developer experience and to make integration and interoperability easy: query the ledger with SQL, join to external databases, perform bulk imports, and code contracts in a range of modern, standard languages.
You can find out more in their introductory whitepaper and this blog post on why they built Corda and what makes it different.
So do take a look around when the code is released: there’s a lot in there that is still work-in-progress and not yet integrated. For example, you’ll find a fascinating approach to writing financial contracts in the experimental branch and ongoing work on our deterministic sandbox for the JVM. We will, of course, also be developing a commercial version of Corda for those who need specific enterprise features and support, but the open source codebase is the foundation of everything we do.
This is a really important point: distributed ledger technologies will have such phenomenally powerful network effects that it is unthinkable that serious institutions would deploy base-layer ledger software that is anything other than fully and wholeheartedly open. And it’s why we’ve been committed all along to releasing Corda just as soon as we were sure it was heading in the right direction. It is and so we are.
What to expect on November 30, 2016:
We’re really proud of Corda and its progress to date. But, that said, Corda is far from finished. Mike Hearn will soon be publishing a “warts and all” description of quite how much work we still have to do. This is true for all other platforms in this space, of course, but I feel a particular responsibility to be transparent given the ambitions we have for Corda and the uses to which it will be put.
- Functional completeness: Corda still has gaps in its functional capabilities. The technical whitepaper outlines the full vision and you’ll see us working on and merging a lot of functional enhancements in the coming months to implement the full vision in the paper.
- Non-functional characteristics: We focused first on design and then on implementation of Corda’s core functionality. The work to ensure we meet our non-functional requirements, such as performance, is still ahead of us but we have a clear roadmap and have designed the platform with these needs firmly in mind.
- Security hardening: There are lots of areas where we need to tighten up security. Much of this we know about and we have called it out in the code or associated docs. But there will, of course, be others. So just as you shouldn’t be using other enterprise DLT platforms in production just yet, please don’t download Corda and put it straight into production just yet either!
- API Stability: Corda’s development is iterative and organic – and it is heavily influenced by the range of projects and applications to which our members are choosing to put it. As we learn about common patterns and discover assumptions that prove to be wrong, we adapt. In particular, this means that we do not commit to API stability or backwards-compatibility until version 1.0. Expect parts of the implementation to change in the coming months, perhaps quite significantly!
But these things are transient: we know how to fix them and we’ll knock the issues off one-by-one in the coming months as we head towards version 1.0. But we want you to be fully aware of them.
How to get Corda on November 30
Corda’s home will be corda.net.
Head over to corda.net on November 30 for links to the codebase, simple sample applications and a tutorial to get started writing your own CorDapps.
Read Richard Brown’s update in full here.