Eight R3 blockchain consortium bank members successfully tested Intel's 'Sawtooth Lake' blockchain platform

Eight banking members of the R3 blockchain consortium have successfully tested a blockchain prototype that simulated the exchange of U.S. Treasury bonds.

While this type of testing is not new, this one is notable because it used technology developed by Intel and released earlier this year, called Sawtooth Lake, a platform that provides insights into how secure hardware can play a role in distributed ledger architectures.

Intel Vice President Jerry Bautista said in a statement:

“We believe that joint exploration of blockchain use cases is key to the development of this emerging technology.”

According to R3, the test used ‘off-the-cloud nodes’ run by banks and R3 and Intel in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. The eight R3 members involved in the test included: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, ING Bank, HSBC, Scotiabank, Societe Generale, State Street, UBS and UniCredit.

There’s also a small detail in the statement that hints at R3’s thinking on the project’s architecture, and the inherent problems that might arise if financial institutions seek to host blockchain networks in the cloud.

R3's head of research, Tim Swanson, further built on this idea with a statement at the Shanghai Global Blockchain Summit, where he reminded that the 'cloud' might be best thought of as 'someone else's computer'.

“Magic internet chain, magical internet coin, whatever the buzzword is, no matter how you cut these systems down, they’re all encrypted data stored in the cloud. If you have to rely on external institutions, you still have to rely on these organizations to handle the operations and maintenance. There’s no future for this.”

Meanwhile, cloud providers including IBM and Microsoft are showing growing interest in blockchain technology.