R3 and banking consortium complete blockchain test

The banking consortium that, together with technology company R3, is researching standards and protocols for the use of blockchain technology within the existing financial world, has completed its investigation.

R3 CEV and the 42 banks used five different blockchains to issue, trade and redeem financial products during the 60-day test period. R3 believes that it has completed the largest investigation into blockchain technology, writes Forbes.

It used blockchains from Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel. Chain is a private blockchain and Eris provides, in addition to a blockchain, a way to ‘link’ different blockchains together. IBM is researching proprietary blockchain technology, as is Intel. Ethereum provided the private Go-Ethereum blockchain.

In addition to developing standards and protocols, the research of the R3 Global Collaborative Lab aims to develop new software that can function as a standard communication layer between the different blockchains, such as between the public Ethereum blockchain and the private blockchain Chain. Controlled experiments are run in the lab. For the experiments, the researchers used Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon AWS.

The results of the investigation are not stated further, only that the test phase has been completed. The fact that so many major banks participated in the project shows, according to Forbes, that “fintech, bitcoin and blockchain startups” have the potential to change even large institutions like Wall Street.

The New York Times reports that the G20 Financial Stability Board said last Saturday that the implications of fintech innovations will be the core task for next year. It could even propose rules to avoid disrupting the larger financial system.