“It’s a funny story,” says Richard Brown, chief technology officer of R3, an enterprise software firm originally set up in 2014 as a blockchain consortium backed by major banks. When the vendor started working on Conclave, its confidential computing platform, “we didn’t envisage it being a new product. It was actually intended to improve some features of Corda, our blockchain.”

Last week, R3 unveiled Conclave, almost two years after realizing that the improvements it was looking to make to