According to Gartner, the business value added by blockchain technology is expected to increase more than $176 billion by 2025 and exceed $3.1 trillion by the year 2030. The blockchain technology delivers a real impact in a number of sectors within the APAC region and acts as an important part of the technology stack among organisations.
India has seen exponential technological growth over the years—being the country with the second-highest number of internet users in the world and is home to the world’s third-largest technology start-up hub. India has the capability to become a global leader in the wide-scale adoption of blockchain technology and has already started to establish its visibility in the blockchain industry as one of the leading nations in blockchain patents.
By far, the active applications of blockchain technology have been achieving the most traction in sectors, such as financial services, supply chain, and insurance industry in India. With a similar vision, US-based R3 has been striving for enterprise blockchain adoption across verticals as well as exploring the industry use cases of blockchain in India.
We got in touch with the Head of Asia Pacific, Amit Ghosh, who leads R3’s strategy in APAC, including market entry strategy, pricing strategy & sales/partnership strategy. Launched in September 2015 by David E. Rutter, R3 is an enterprise software firm that is working with more than 350 participants in the global ecosystem across multiple industries.
Headquartered in New York City, R3 has a global team of over 200 professionals in 13 countries and is supported by over 2,000 technology, financial and legal experts. The company has a presence throughout APAC with a focus on five key markets – Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand and India.
Blockchain Is Central To R3
The flagship product, Corda is an open-source blockchain platform that enables businesses to transact directly as well as in strict privacy using various processes, such as smart contracts, reducing transaction and record-keeping costs and streamlining business operations. It has a fixed strict privacy model that allows businesses to transact securely and seamlessly.
The company also delivers a fully compatible distribution of the platform, known as Corda Enterprise. Corda Enterprise is an enterprise blockchain platform which offers features and services fine-tuned for modern-day businesses.
According to Ghosh, Corda is the first custom-built blockchain for enterprise, designed for business, by businesses and prioritises easy integration, presenting businesses with easily deployable solutions, not more problems.
The strength of Corda comes from its ecosystem of CorDapps, i.e. applications developed on Corda. The CorDapps work by overcoming specific challenges faced by the customers and are already being used in industries across both the public and private sector, from financial services to healthcare, insurance and more.
In India, R3’s Corda is being leveraged to simplify processes, increase levels of automation, and create new business opportunities. Specific to India, Ghosh mentioned several industries of focus-
- Insurance: Ledgertech leveraged Corda Enterprise platform of R3 in order to develop an insurance solution that handles the entire underwriting and claims process end-to-end.
- Govtech: Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA), an initiative of the Government of Kerala became a general member of R3’s consortium last year. The KBA initiative has also partnered with R3 to launch a developer certification program built on R3’s Corda.
- Digital Cash and Payments: Federal Bank of India is currently building a new cross border remittance application on R3’s Corda.
- Cross-Industry: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is building five blockchain platforms that include track and trace, digital identity, asset monetisation, assets in common and tokenisation, on Microsoft’s Azure and R3’s Corda Enterprise.
Core Tech Stack
Corda is built on relational databases, message queues and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). According to Ghosh, Corda underpins top-of-stack applications or CorDapps that can be written in Java. Corda’s smart contracts enable privacy and finality across any agreement or asset type. It also ensures the confidentiality of trades and agreements while also capturing the benefits of a shared distributed ledger infrastructure.
The Corda Enterprise contains the Blockchain Application Firewall, which enables it to be deployed inside corporate data centres while retaining the ability to communicate securely with other nodes anywhere in the world.
Helping Organisations Overcome Challenges Due To The Pandemic
To this, Ghosh stated, “For organisations to continue business momentum during these times, they are required to have a platform that is interoperable, scalable, safe and cost-efficient.” He added, “By providing a blockchain platform tailored for business needs, R3 has been helping countless businesses overcome the challenges of legacy-based enterprise technology platforms.”
Future Roadmap
According to Ghosh, R3 is currently in continuous dialogue with a very wide and diverse range of businesses, regulators and various blockchain initiatives. The company also continues to innovate with products like Conclave.
Still, in its beta testing phase, Conclave is R3’s new platform for building secure Java-based hardware enclaves inside Intel SGX. Conclave brings secure multi-party computation to the table, enabling entities to work with data and extract insights while keeping it in a protected, confidential and private state.
If you loved this story, do join our Telegram Community.
Also, you can write for us and be one of the 500+ experts who have contributed stories at AIM. Share your nominations here.
