R3 Admits Defeat, Stops Blockchain Development
R3CEV, the largest blockchain consortium of banks and technology firms includng multi-billion dollar institutions such as Barclays, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Citibank and HSBC, officially admitted defeat and moved on from blockchain technology development.
Over the past two years, various consortia and bank-funded blockchain startups raised billions of dollars to utilize blockchain technology in optimizing the global financial network. The vast majority of developers of actual cryptographic and open source projects such as bitcoin and Monero have explicitly stated that the utilization of centralized blockchain networks isn’t efficient due to their severe security flaws.
More importantly, blockchain technology isn’t structured to handle millions of data sets and hundreds of millions of data points in real time. In fact, one limitation of bitcoin as a digital currency is its inability to facilitate massive amounts of transactions faster, like a settlement network to be critical. However, bitcoin users, companies and developers aren’t pushing for reckless developments on top of bitcoin to ensure appropriate security measures are maintained.
In a presentation about the R3 Corda, R3CEV engineers, developers and researchers stated “No ‘block chain’ because we don’t need one,” admitting that the utilization and implementation of blockchain doesn’t fit their vision and more importantly, technological compatibility.
The global financial industry, network and ecosystem are in urgent need of an overhaul of infrastructure and architecture. It is very difficult for anyone to facilitate payments efficiently through bank systems and regulated financial networks.
R3CEV still maintains a development team of high technological knowledge, foundation and experience. With its team of talented blockchain and bitcoin developers, the R3 consortium will be able to come up with a piece of software or financial network that could most likely drastically improve the global financial industry. However, blockchain technology isn’t what the consortium needs because it simply can’t be implemented into fully regulated markets without tampering with security measures of blockchain technology.
In the upcoming months, the R3 Corda and the R3 development team will allocate its resources in developing a platform that is compliant and compatible with industry-standard protocols such as AMQP, JDBC and PKIX, while sustaining a close relationship with regulators to avoid any potential regulatory conflicts.
Ever since its launch, the R3 consortium has emphasized the processing of massive volumes of data and maintenance of a transparent and immutable network of financial operations. It is certainly a smart decision to move on from blockchain technology which the consortium has failed to implement and commercialize in a large scale.
Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core developer and well renowned cryptographer, consistently criticized the efficiency of R3 Corda and the R3 Consortium’s other blockchain platforms. He described it as “bitcoin without blockchain.”
Now, the R3 Consortium and its developers can have the freedom to work on whichever software or technology they believe are most relevant in solving the global financial industry’s major problems.
All that time and $$$ wasted when they simply could have looked to NEM or Mijin!
