The Bank of Thailand (BoT) has revealed plans to develop a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will use R3’s Corda platform, in a press release published August 21. A CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank whose legal tender status depends on government regulation or law. The “wholesale” variant of CBDC limits its use to financial institutions and markets, as opposed to a “retail CBDC” for the general public. R3’s Corda, for its part, is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that has been designed to work within the financial service sector and uses a …

Blockchain technology company R3 announced July 10 that it had released a “version” of its Corda blockchain platform aimed specifically at businesses. R3 is a consortium of over 200 companies that research and develop blockchain applications for the industries of finance and commerce. Corda Enterprise, ostensibly “optimised to meet the demands of modern day businesses,” includes a “Blockchain Application Firewall” to allow the platform to run within corporate data centers and still communicate with Corda’s nodes. Applications available on the regular Corda are now also functional on Corda Enterprise, R3 confirmed. The new Corda unveiling comes amid an atmosphere of …

39 financial firms partnered with blockchain consortium R3 completed more than 300 transactions via R3’s know your customer (KYC) application, according to a post on R3’s blog June 28. R3’s KYC project involved major financial and banking institutions worldwide such as Deutsche Bank, ING, the National Bank of Egypt, Raiffeisen Bank International, and others. It also involved regulators and central banks such as the Central Bank of Colombia, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and the Financial Superintendence of Colombia. The transactions were conducted across eight timezones in 19 countries, wherein banks could request access to customer KYC data, and …

Bitcoin (BTC) developer Jimmy Song stated that using blockchain tech for a private, centralized system, such as an enterprise, ‘makes zero sense’ in an interview with Laura Shin June 26. Song, also a venture partner at Blockchain Capital, spoke on the podcast Unchained about his work as an architect on an enterprise private blockchain at Paxos for two years, noting that he “couldn’t” make a private blockchain work: “Every single time I came back to the same thing, you have to have some central point of failure, in which case a blockchain makes zero sense [...] I tried so hard …

CLS, a provider of foreign exchange settlement and processing, has invested $5 mln in R3, a New-York-based blockchain consortium, Reuters reported May 30. Under the deal, CLS will have a seat on R3’s Board of Directors. The deal reportedly comes as a part of the third tranche of R3’s fundraiser, which also included financing from Singapore real estate firm OUE and Japanese IT services provider TIS. David Rutter, R3’s chief executive officer, shared his enthusiasm about major infrastructure players’ involvement in using blockchain technology to improve their products: “It is absolutely right that major infrastructure players like this look to …