The Latest from Corda: Cordite, Corda Enterprise, and Settler

By now, I hope that you have learned how to use most of Corda’s important features in different use cases. In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of Corda’s latest developments, such as Cordite, Corda Enterprise edition, and Corda Settler, most of which are still in beta phases undergoing updates. Hopefully, they will help industry to expedite the adoption of decentralized ledger technology by the mainstream.

Corda Enterprise Crypto Token—Cordite

In Chapter 11, we observed how tokenization is a great way to engage with clients early in ambitious ventures. A token can have a single use or multiple different uses. It can be a payment token like Bitcoin that people can use as an alternate payment medium, or it can be a utility token like a loyalty point that a user can use instead of paying fiat cash.

Ethereum made this concept extremely popular, leading to the creation of thousands of cryptocurrencies through initial currency offerings (ICOs), where established cryptocurrencies such as Ethers are accepted from investors as an investment toward an upcoming business venture and a new cryptocurrency is launched, exchanged with investors, and registered in crypto-exchanges to grab worldwide public attention. Many of you might be aware that the ICO market has recently started losing its luster; but why?

Infrastructure costs were considerable.
Not having well-defined tokenomics and token utility led to a lack of clarity in marketing plans and campaigns.
People started paying more attention to enterprise applications in Blockchain.

In Chapter 7, I discussed a hybrid approach in which ICO investments can be accepted in Ethers and then a Corda decentralized application can be built separately. However, we now have Cordite, a platform where ERC-20–like standard tokens can be created using Corda platform for enterprise applications in the most secure way. This approach will empower Blockchain companies to track both sides of the applications (i.e., the inflow of investments through fiat cash or cryptocurrencies) on the same ledger, rather than having one complete separate application running off-chain.

It’s worth noting that the governments of many countries like India and China either completely prohibit or tightly regulate ICOs. The reason is that ICOs in their current forms are mostly archaic in nature. However, Cordite being run on Corda’s private permissioned ledger can be safely used for an ICO event where only registered participants can participate, which can expand the usage of ICO crowd sales to many more regions of the world. Cordite is currently in its beta version, and its version 1 is expected to hit the market hopefully later in 2019.

Corda Enterprise

In July 2018, Corda released its first enterprise version; this version allows organizations not only to achieve the same functionalities as before, but to get the benefits of many parameters that were not present or had limited availability in Corda’s community version. Apart from the same regular features, the commercial version comes with a firewall, support for Oracle and SQL server databases, capacity planning for sizing and scalability, compatibility with the community version (i.e., code tested on the community version will also work on the enterprise version), 24/7 support, and much more. This version will facilitate most of Corda’s partners to expedite their new products to market and further develop their areas of business. As per Finextra News ( www.finextra.com/pressarticle/74613/r3-launches-corda-enterprise ): “Applications developed by partners such as Finastra, Gemalto, Guardtime, GuildOne, TradeIX and Tradewind Markets are now live on both Corda Enterprise and Corda, serving a rapidly growing community of end users in sectors as diverse as insurance, healthcare, shipping and financial services.”

Global Payments on Corda with Settler

As per open banking or PSD2 (Second Payment Services Directive) rules, the UK’s nine biggest banks (HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Santander, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, Danske, Lloyds, and Nationwide) have to expose their data in a secure, standardized form so that it can be shared between authorized organizations online with ease. It’s about giving consumers more control over their data so that they can have a view of their money in all banks on a single platform, share account data details to third parties for loans or quick credit ratings, and so on.

In cross-border remittances, costs can go down dramatically and transaction times can drop from days to minutes/seconds by using Blockchain; this is one of the biggest Blockchain finance use cases. We all know that when it comes to cross-border remittances, Ripple’s name comes to mind first, and Corda has already done some work in this area.

Now Corda has come up with something even more advanced: Settler.

On December 5, 2018, Corda announced the launch of a “Universal Settler Application to Facilitate Global Payments on Corda”; XRP (native currency from Ripple) is the first settlement mechanism. Corda Settler is built to ensure seamless settlement of payments on Corda across all payment schemes.

As per the announcement on Corda’s website ( www.r3.com/news/r3-launches-universal-corda-settler-application/ ):

The deployment of the Corda Settler and its support for XRP as the first settlement mechanism is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together. While the Settler will be open to all forms of crypto and traditional assets, this demonstration with XRP is the next logical step in showing how widespread acceptance and use of digital assets to transfer value and make payments can be achieved.
—Richard Gendal Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3

As per a tweet by XRP Research Center ( https://twitter.com/XrpCenter/status/1070334594493243392 ), this is beneficial not only for Corda lovers but for XRP practitioners too. The advantages they claim are as follows:

Second app able to settle with XRP (after xRapid)
Development decentralization (+ arguments against security claims)
Potential reach to 200+ tech companies and financial institutions
Programmable settlements with XRP (Corda smart contracts)

Doesn’t this look like one of the biggest news items in the world of Blockchain in 2018? Well, Settler is open source, and its code can be found on github at https://github.com/corda/corda-settler , all written in Kotlin. You can try your hand at this piece, and Corda claims that will soon come up with integrations with other cryptos as well as fiat currencies on Settler.

Live Implementations of Remittance

Kerala, the southernmost state of India, accounts for 35% of all foreign remittances of the country, mostly through Federal Bank, a major commercial bank in India. In October 2018, Federal Bank was in the news for building a new cross-border remittance application on Corda.

Bangalore-based Blockchain startup DigiLedge is helping Federal Bank to develop this remittance app for faster and cheaper remittances.

ICICI and Emirates NBD have already initiated cross-border remittances in October 2016.

Conclusion

Most Blockchain enthusiasts I have met so far believe that Corda is the Blockchain platform of choice for the finance and insurance domains. In truth, however, any B2B Blockchain that is on the lookout for privacy, identity/authentication, notarization, partial data visibility, multisignature support, interoperability, and so on can be used. If you need to know what organizations have used it so far to build either Proofs or real DApps, you can get a glimpse at the Corda marketplace: https://marketplace.r3.com/dashboard .

The Corda team has loads of plans to realize in their future releases. Here is a list of ideas: https://docs.corda.net/head/corda-api.html . Here, one can view the modules that are stable in production, the incubating ones expected on the market soon, and those that are unstable as of now.

The future is bright for Blockchain lovers, and that future is Corda!

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