R3 Tests 5 Cloud-Based Blockchain Technologies with 40 Banks

Private distributed ledger technologies built by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel were all tested within R3's global collaborative lab. Smart contracts for issuance, secondary trading and redemption of commercial paper were used to analyze the technology of the five vendors.

Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon AWS all provided the cloud technology.
The firms that participated in the experiment were: Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BBVA, BMO Financial Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, CIBC, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ING Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, JPMorgan, Macquarie Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Natixis, Nordea, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotiabank, SEB, Societe Generale, State Street, TD Bank Group, UBS, UniCredit, US Bank, Wells Fargo and Westpac Banking Corporation.

This marks the second time R3 has publicized an experiment with the blockchain this year. In January it connected 11 banks via R3's private, peer-to-peer distributed ledger, which was backed by Ethereum and hosted on Microsoft Azure.

"With the completion of this trial we have raised the bar significantly with the sheer number of global financial institutions, distributed ledger technologies and cloud providers working together in parallel to demonstrate how this nascent technology can be applied to real-world financial markets processes by deploying smart contracts on an actively traded asset class," says Tim Grant, managing director and global head of R3's collaborative lab. "This represents great momentum for the R3 consortium and the technology providers, and supports our aim to move distributed ledger technology from vision to execution."