Corda is designed to meet regulatory and commercial requirements and has been used in the banking, insurance and capital markets.
Original title: “Corda is becoming the Windows of the digital asset world”
Written by: Gu Yanxi, founder of the American Liyan Consulting Company, a researcher and practitioner in the blockchain and encrypted digital asset industry
In a previous article , I talked about the underlying operating system in the future digital asset world. As in the PC era, whoever masters the underlying operating system has the right to decide in this market. Because Microsoft has mastered the PC operating system, Microsoft, a startup company, has become one of the world’s largest companies with the development of the PC market. Today’s digital asset world is taking shape, and the digital asset world also needs the support of the underlying infrastructure. Among the underlying infrastructure, distributed accounting technology is the core component. Which distributed accounting technology is widely adopted, then this distributed accounting technology will develop with the development of the digital asset world. It now appears that Corda is gradually becoming a mainstream application in the world of digital assets. It is very likely to become the Windows in the digital asset world in the future.
So far, Ethereum is still the most widely adopted public chain. The vast majority of digital asset applications are developed on Ethereum, including stablecoins currently in circulation. However, due to the characteristics of the public chain of Ethereum, it cannot be applied to financial services and become the underlying foundation of the future digital financial ecology. Only the underlying distributed accounting technology that meets the financial regulatory requirements and conforms to the business operation habits can become the financial market infrastructure of the future digital asset world.
Among such applications that have appeared in the current market, Corda has a clear lead. First of all, it is designed to meet the requirements and habits of regulatory and commercial company operations, and is particularly suitable for the operation of financial institutions. Corda itself is open source, so it meets a basic requirement for the underlying infrastructure of the future digital asset world. In terms of the organization that runs it, R3 itself is an alliance organized by a number of global financial institutions. This organizational form is suitable for the promotion of underlying blockchain technology. In terms of specific practices, Corda has been adopted by many financial institutions in the past few years. It is used in banking, insurance, and capital markets, as well as in financial services such as trade finance, digital asset exchanges, syndicated loans and bond issuance. Moreover, the financial institutions that adopt Corda are some of the world’s leading financial institutions, such as Switzerland’s SDX and Nasdaq. These financial institutions adopt Corda to show their recognition of Corda. This will further promote the adoption of Corda in other financial institutions.
Now R3 is building a Corda-based network. Since then, more and more financial institutions will develop digital asset business on this network. Although such a network has a short history of operation, it has begun to show its network effects. Companies operating in this network have begun to require partners outside the network to join this network in order to cooperate. As more and more organizations realize the advantages of doing business on the Corda network, the growth of institutional users in the network will have an accelerated development trend. This will make Corda the default infrastructure in the future asset world. Just as Ethereum is the default public chain for various applications now, Corda will therefore become the default underlying operating system for the digital asset world in the future.
Compared with Corda, other similar distributed accounting technologies such as Quorum and Fabric are far less developed in terms of digital assets than Corda. The underlying blockchain of Libra, which is planning to launch, although its positioning is a simple financial market infrastructure, it has not been tested by the market. In addition, the most important point is that Libra is positioned to serve retail customers, so its design and business model are completely different from Corda. Corda was designed from the beginning to support cooperation between financial institutions. Therefore, even after the launch of Libra’s underlying blockchain, the market it serves is different from Corda. So now it seems that Corda is very likely to become the Windows of the digital asset world in the future.
So, is Corda the only underlying operating system in the future digital asset world? The answer is obviously no. Looking at the operating systems of PC and mobile applications, there are two mainstream operating systems. The operating systems of the PC are Windows and IOS. The operating systems of mobile applications are Android and IOS. From this perspective, the digital asset world in the future may still have at least two underlying distributed accounting technologies. The other may be the distributed accounting technology that has already appeared in the market, or it may not yet appear. Given that the world of digital assets is still in its infancy, there is still a great chance that another underlying distributed accounting technology will emerge.
