R3CEV blockchain project progress: product release within a year?

The R3CEV blockchain project is the blockchain project with the most bank support in the world, and currently 30 banks have joined the project's research work.

According to蒂姆•斯旺森, who joined R3 full-time this year as head of market research and a researcher at Singapore Management University, the biggest challenge in designing the protocol with banks was managing expectations while building a working platform as quickly as possible.

Tim Swanson says:

"It's a bad idea to over-hype it, but it's too late to say that now. At Sibos (the global payments conference held in Singapore last month), everyone was talking about blockchain. This situation has forced us to give the world an explanation within the next year - to come up with a product, otherwise people will sneer at us and think we are just talking on paper."

Swanson will attend a blockchain seminar this week sponsored by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), while Westpac will also launch a blockchain design competition at fintech hub Stone & Chalk on Tuesday.

CBA has just created a virtual blockchain at its innovation lab in Sydney that will be used to demonstrate to regulators how blockchain technology can reduce costs and risks in international payments and other applications.

Swanson said in a Skype call from San Francisco last week:

“A lot of banks feel they can reduce or eliminate all sorts of costs by adopting some kind of shared ledger and spreading that benefit across the industry.”

Access rights not yet agreed upon

Swanson said that while R3’s blockchain project is designed to be open source, access rights have not yet been agreed upon, nor whether participants will be limited to member banks, which would affect how the “nodes” that verify transactions will operate. However, R3 will soon decide whether to allow outside partners to assist their technology development team in London.

Swanson said member banks have a wide range of interests in the application of R3 blockchain projects, including trade finance, processing group loans, settlement and clearing of OTC derivatives and market lending. "It's a big umbrella," he said.

But to deploy actual customer funds or data onto a blockchain, regulatory sign-off is required, which is one of the reasons why CBA is holding a blockchain seminar in Sydney this week.

Regulators will not let you pass the test just because you created a technology. Even if you created such a technology, financial institutions may not necessarily use it. If there is no recognition from regulators and financial institutions, it will be useless. The best way is to start from scratch and build on the specific needs of the regulator.

"I have communicated with regulators in many countries, and 'cautiously optimistic' can be used to summarize their attitude towards this technology. On the one hand, they will humbly understand what kind of technology it is, and on the other hand, they will take a legitimate conservative approach to ensure that things go smoothly."

Swanson said the technology could also assist regulators in monitoring systemic risks in financial markets.

If our development work can proceed smoothly in the right direction, we will be able to provide regulators with a real-time data window to monitor financial markets. They can view market conditions and formulate corresponding policies. If regulators have a window to know what is happening in the market, they can propose better ways to prevent systemic risks.

R3 has recently recruited talent from some of the world’s largest technology companies and banks to further strengthen its development team. R3’s chief technology officer is the former executive architect of IBM’s banking innovation business, its chief engineer is the former executive architect of Barclays Bank, and its chief platform engineer is a senior software engineer who worked at Google for seven years.

Original article: http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/r3-cev-says-global-bank-blockchain-should-be-operating-within-a-year-20151206-glgyvv.html
By James Eyers
Compiled by: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/r3cev-new-development)