For most firms getting a good understanding of what is blockchain and its possible use is a challenging exercise. Once that has been established a further decision has to be made regarding whether or not to build their blockchain solution on a public or private blockchain system.

Within the first two weeks of January 2019, both the public and private blockchain proponents expressed their views on the merits of their systems. For this podcast we had the pleasure of having Richard Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, the builders of Corda, a private blockchain system, express his views.

 

Who is R3?

R3 is an enterprise software company that produces an open-source blockchain called Corda. Corda was first launched in 2016, initially for financial services sectors, mainly banks. However, it was the insurance industry that helped broaden Corda’s view and utility as a blockchain for other industries. Now in 2019, Corda has launched the 4thversion of Corda which has already been adopted by finance, insurance, healthcare, government, and the oil and gas industry.

 

What is blockchain?

What is interesting to know is that in the early days of R3 they didn’t begin with the ambition or the intention of building a blockchain platform. R3 began as a collaborative exercise between a large number of large firms to try and figure out what is blockchain and what the opportunities and implications it might have.

The conclusion they came out with regarding “What is blockchain?” is that blockchain is a technology or an approach to building systems that allows multiple parties who want to transact, but who don’t fully trust each other to do so in a way that allows each and every one of them to know what they see on their computer is exactly the same as what their counterparts sees on theirs. This massively drives down duplication costs, errors, inconsistencies and the need for reconciliation which allows firms to focus on solving business problems and transacting with their counterparts. Essentially, once you know what you see is accurate, that you know the information you’re working on is correct, you can make decisions more quickly and with more confidence.

 

Busting the myth of private blockchains - Consensys

On the 3rdof January an author at Consensys, an Ethereum based blockchain technology company, published a blog post entitled “Busting the Myth of Private Blockchains”, whose main point was to explain why enterprises shouldn’t use private blockchains in business:

Business networks need resilience, interoperability, permissioning, and privacy to succeed. These requirements, however, are out of scope for proprietary distributed ledgers, let alone traditional database technologies. The Ethereum blockchain’s granular privacy layers and public-first approach make it a powerful enterprise solution for organizations that need the flexibility of an in-house platform and that want the global reach to participate in economies of scale.

 

 

The Rebutal – Busting the myth of public blockchains for business

On the 14th of January, Richard wrote a blog post “Busting the myth of public blockchains for business”. In this blog post he debunks three of the main arguments the Ethereum community makes on why business...