Pencil and R3 meet face to face: Hope to establish cooperation and work together with the Chinese community

Reporter: Pencil lead

In May, Ping An of China announced that it had joined the R3 CEV blockchain alliance, which immediately became a hot topic. After that, many domestic financial institutions also began to pay attention to distributed ledger technology, generally called "blockchain" technology. The development of blockchain technology has swept the world, and R3 is the first commercial alliance established with the goal of creating distributed ledger applications. Many people want to know what makes R3 so popular. Let's see how Tim Swanson, head of market research at R3, answered.

First, let me briefly introduce the "mysterious" blockchain organization R3. R3 is actually a financial services company. It is a business alliance that aims to create a "new era of global financial services technology" to develop a series of products. This is not a standardization organization. It currently has more than 50 members worldwide, making it the world's largest distributed ledger technology alliance. They are absorbing new members, including non-bank institutions such as insurance companies. They have begun to study the application of distributed ledger technology in cross-industry financial systems. Last winter, they participated in several platform tests including Ethereum, Eris, Chain, IBM and Intel. The Ethereum test was participated by 40 members and centered on commercial paper transactions and short-term notes of large institutions, showing R3's ability to handle large projects.

R3's influence has spread across the globe. ChainB reporter had the honor of having a face-to-face conversation with R3's Tim Swanson to discuss his insights on the R3 Alliance. He said:

"China is the world's second largest economy and it must not be ignored. We also attach great importance to the Chinese market."

According to Tim, R3 sees a lot of potential in the Chinese market. In fact, many companies in China are very interested in distributed ledger technology, but many people don’t know how to participate now. This issue has also caused a series of misunderstandings. For example, the news that Ping An joined R3 has caused many people to be confused. After all, Ping An Group is one of the largest financial groups in China. Its joining has made many companies and financial institutions believe that only financially strong institutions like Ping An are eligible to join R3. In response to this question, Tim said that this is not the case. "We are willing to develop new members in China, regardless of the size of their companies." This also shows R3's strong willingness to establish cooperative relations with Chinese institutions.

Speaking about the latest developments in the Corda project, a distributed ledger platform designed by R3, Tim Swanson revealed:

“The Corda project has a specific roadmap with detailed milestones to achieve. The code is refined internally based on feedback from members. We plan to make the source code publicly available and help create an open standard.”

In the first quarter of this year, several domestic banks were exposed to bill fraud cases involving billions of RMB, which also attracted much attention. Obviously, other financial institutions have also seen similar problems. Tim Swanson said:

“Other countries have had issues with remortgage note fraud. Distributed ledger cryptography is a good way to solve this problem.”

Obviously, there are many loopholes in China's securities bill system. This will not only affect the public society, but also disrupt the operation of financial institutions. The regulatory authorities will also begin to think about many issues, such as how to fix system loopholes, how to ensure the security of bills, and how to prevent more such cases from happening. This is an important entry point for blockchain technology, an opportunity and a challenge. Although blockchain technology may be difficult to make a profit in the short term, from a long-term perspective, it has great potential in many fields. How to truly use blockchain technology to solve existing problems requires the joint efforts of all parties.

In September this year, the Shanghai Blockchain International Week, jointly organized by Wanxiang Lab and ChainB, is a grand event in the blockchain industry. Many leading figures in the industry will give speeches, and Tim Swanson will also attend. I believe that this blockchain summit will allow the public to have a better understanding of blockchain technology, and at the same time, it will also enhance the understanding of this technology by regulatory authorities and relevant financial institutions. For China, the innovation of this technology can bring solutions to existing problems, and Chinese companies are focusing on blockchain applications. At the same time, we also hope that domestic and foreign companies can cooperate and work together to study this technology, and then use blockchain and distributed ledger technology to promote the development of the global financial industry.