Corda is a financial grade distributed ledger that records, executes and manages institutions’ financial agreements in perfect synchrony with their peers. It was built in close collaboration with over 70 banks and financial institutions and is already by far the biggest collaborative effort of its kind in the distributed ledger space.

Corda is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, but with design choices that make it able to meet the needs of regulated financial institutions. Crucially, Corda restricts access to data within an agreement to only those who need to validate it. Financial agreements on Corda take the form of smart contracts, linking business logic and data to associated legal prose in order to ensure that the financial agreements on the platform are rooted firmly in law.

David Rutter, CEO of R3 comments: “The successful application of distributed ledger technology to financial services relies on new solutions being able to integrate and workseamlessly with each other, otherwise the disjointed infrastructure financial markets are forced to operate with today will simply be replicated with different technology. The applications being built therefore need to be based on common, open, interoperable platforms - much like the common protocols on which the internet operates today. Open sourcing Corda is the next step in making Corda one of these platforms”.

Developers can download the platform’s source code at Corda.net, the new website for Corda’s open source community. Clicking the “Get Corda” link on the front page opens up the public repository on GitHub with instructions on how to set up the platform. Corda.net also offers resources for non-developers, including an introduction to Corda, documentation, a blog and a discussion forum enabling iteraction with the R3 team.

R3 – Corda Overview from R3 on Vimeo.