Beyond Banking: R3's Expanding Vision for Global Blockchain

The core idea is similar to the one originally pitched: if companies share data and assets with each other on Corda, they can ax duplicative processes and trust that they are all on the same page about who did what.

While Brown said Corda has attracted interest from a variety of industries, the new positioning of the platform comes at a time when the dust appears to have settled after 2016's hype about corporations exploring blockchain.

For R3, it's a pivotal time, as the startup is finalizing the first commercial distribution of the open-source Corda platform, targeted for the end of the second quarter.

Rather, Brown describes the vision as "An open shared network - but still private, secured and permissioned."

The R3 Corda team were inspired by ethereum's goal of participants all running the same business logic while getting rid of silos and friction between different applications, he said.

The global broadcast design of public blockchain networks, while perhaps necessary in a trustless system like bitcoin, is unpalatable to enterprises.

"My critique of some of the enterprise blockchain platforms is that being originally inspired by a full broadcast system, I would argue that often they share too much," Brown said.

Corda will not show data up front, Brown said, but will send a piece of evidence to convince the other parties about a fact or set of facts, regardless of whether it's to do with banking, hotels or airlines.

Aside from keeping data private within the Corda network, sharing it via the internet presents another, more immediate problem.

"One version of a Corda 3 node deployed to a network will be compatible with any future version of Corda, so that you don't have to upgrade the whole network," Brown said.