The largest blockchain trial ever, R3 says it’s just the beginning

Blockchain startup R3CEV made a splash in late 2015, quickly becoming the focus of the blockchain industry after revealing its partnerships with a string of large banks. Since the beginning of this year, R3CEV has stepped up efforts to disclose its research progress.

First, in January, R3CEV revealed that it had participated in testing the next-generation blockchain platform Ethereum. On March 3, the startup revealed that it had partnered with 40 banks to test five major blockchain projects.

While the trial itself focused on commercial paper transactions, short-term debt securities used by large corporations, R3 managing director Tim Grant explained that the main purpose of the test was to highlight the startup’s ability to take on large-scale projects.

Grant told reporters:

“The real key part of the trial was not the commercial paper, but more about proving that we can bring together so many institutions and ledger technologies, not just the classic Ethereum implementation, but also a large West Coast startup like Chain.”

He explained that all banks were encouraged to collaborate with other banks in the trial, and Grant said at least 600 transactions had been conducted in the simulation. (No real funds were used in the test.)

Grant also explained why the remaining two partner banks refused to participate in the trial, saying:

“This is not something you can just do passively after you get involved. It requires you to invest human and technical resources.”

The way of practice

When it comes to R3’s five technology providers — Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM, Intel and Chain — Grant said they were chosen because of their open source nature.

For the trial, each technology is being tested in a “phased” way so that participating banks can evaluate the differences between them. Each bank will run a test distributed ledger node, while R3 will manage the network.

“They need hands-on experience and we want to bring transparency to our members,” he said.

Grant said that during the trial period, a technology vendor would demonstrate his work to participants every few days. This process allowed R3 customers to get a direct understanding of their underlying technology.

“At the end of the test, we had five ledgers that we could reasonably look at and see how they worked,” he said. “We were able to subjectively evaluate how they did what they did.”

Grant said that after the test, all alliance banks (including those that did not participate) will share the group's research results.

Upcoming Tests

For R3, Grant said the tests successfully demonstrated the company’s ability to integrate multiple versions of the technology, and R3 plans to do more in 2016.

Looking ahead, he said the company plans to delve into other research focused on distributed ledger interoperability, privacy, identity and scalability, and that such testing will likely be smaller in scale.

“For many of the projects we are planning, we will choose a smaller number of partner banks rather than trying to get 40 banks to participate in these projects,” he said. “It will be better to divide them into smaller groups.”

Grant said R3 is also building a review of technology providers, and it may publish the results of the survey to help clients understand how to compare different distributed ledger technologies.

However, he said R3's alliance work was only part of its focus and that it would also build its own architecture and products under the leadership of former IBM executive architect Richard Gendal Brown.

Grant concluded:

“This is just the beginning, and I think there will be a lot of banks and applications and a lot of different types of projects.”

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/r3-biggest-ever-blockchain-trial-is-only-the-beginning/
By Pete Rizzo
Compilation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): 8btc Information (http://www.8btc.com/r3-blockchain-trial)