CHAPTER 14

R3 Corda

“Gartner’s survey saw the usage of Corda at 15% of the reported

use cases in 2018… but rise to over 40% of use cases in 2020,

overtaking Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. These growth point

may be linked to the release of Corda Enterprise by R3, the owner of

Corda, in 2018 and 2019. It is also clear, though, that Corda now

penetrates well beyond its original financial services origin” – Gartner

Version 1.0 Launched: October 2017

Founder: R3

Current Version: 5

In 2014, R3 introduced Corda, a privacy oriented DLT that eventually

became a main competitor to Hyperledger Fabric. Corda initially

came only in the open source version but was soon introduced in the

enterprise version with standard features as support, documentation,

and certification. In this chapter, we will cover the key concepts of R3

Corda and also focus on the privacy and security features that make

it suitable, especially for banking, fintech, and insurance industries,

and others.

14.1 Key Concepts

Let’s first cover some of the key concepts of R3 Corda.

14.1.1 Network

In R3 Corda, each node is represented by an organization with a

unique IP address. Nodes can discover each other through the

network map service. They can communicate with each other on

peer-to-peer basis where all the messages are encrypted using

transport layer security. A node can share the data with one or more