A little while ago, R3 was like
Mel Gibson’s Nick Marshall in What Women Want. It was the alpha male of the blockchain world, Wall Street’s gift to distributed ledger technology. The company exuded confidence, capable of seducing techies and finance types in equal measure. The sky was the limit and the world its oyster. Then came an unexpected wake-up call and the reality that it wasn’t quite pushing all the buttons it thought it was.
The decision by several major banks to leave R3 is by no means the death knell for the consortium, but it does raise that age-old mystery: what do businesses really want from their blockchain providers?
Bank run
R3, which consists of around 70 major players from the banking world, is a big deal. There is a huge amount of talent and influence embodied in the organization. Blockchain has a lot to offer the financial world, and R3’s mission was to deliver on the promises.
At the end of November four major banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, the National Australian Bank and Banco Santander –
took their leave in a move that prompted experts to suggest that the company was struggling to deliver anything of value. A total of seven banks are rumored to be leaving R3.
R3’s flagship projects — Corda, ‘a distributed ledger platform designed from the ground up to record, manage and synchronize financial agreements between regulated financial institutions,’ and a proof-of-concept KYC registry — have apparently failed to wave their partners’ flags. BTCManager’s Christoph Bergmann concludes, “Both Corda and the KYC-blockchain can be solutions to problems of the banking industry. But as the recent bank drain indicates, neither of R3’s projects seems to be the big thing everybody has waited for. Maybe the three banks just realized, that real innovation rarely blossoms in the gated community of a consortium of established institutions.”
Whilst we don’t know what went on behind closed doors, there’s a war brewing for the soul of blockchain, and if R3 isn’t at its epicenter then it,s symptomatic of its values.
The consortium was a magnet for funding and talent, attracting the likes of bitcoin royalty Ian Grigg, and former bitcoin developer Mike Hearn, who
vocally bailed on bitcoin early this year, pronouncing it a failure before starting his new job.
Now it seems a rethink may be on the cards. The banks that have walked out on R3 are all pursuing their own blockchain projects, demonstrating that blockchain isn’t going out of fashion. It’s just that R3 wasn’t able to deliver quite what they wanted — whether in technical or business terms — or it may merely be banks seeing that they may become irrelevant and the banks are trying to keep their piece of the blockchain pie.
Read more:
https://due.com/blog/big-business-blockchain-linux-vs-windows/https://twitter.com/EvelinaLavrova/status/808327741602992128
