We Don’t Need Blockchain: R3 Consortium After $59 Million Research

Commentators have poured scorn on R3 after the banking startup announced it “no longer needs” Blockchain.
William Suberg
Posted by William Suberg February 22, 2017 2 Mins Read
Commentators have poured scorn on R3 after the banking startup announced it “no longer needs” Blockchain.

R3 Consortium’s decision to seemingly abandon Blockchain technology altogether has garnered ridicule from cryptocurrency circles.

In a presentation on its Corda platform, the distributed database technology startup, which features some of the world’s largest corporations and banks, said it “didn’t need” a Blockchain.

This lack of need R3 described as a “pertinent feature” of Corda.

R3 has been moving away from involvement with Blockchain for some time. Its language has more recently changed from being a “Blockchain startup” to a “Blockchain-inspired startup,” as director Clemens Wan described it at the Construct conference in January.

"We found that we didn't want a Blockchain, we wanted to be Blockchain inspired,” he said.

Commentators reacted to the startup’s latest tone with thinly-veiled criticism. The Blockchain research process R3 undertook is reported to have cost $59 mln, money which resulted in no Blockchain being necessary.

Bitcoin Think editor Beautyon described the findings on Twitter as R3 “conceding defeat.”

Elsewhere, Vaultoro exchange co-founder Joshua Scigala said the private Blockchains R3 was originally championing as “idiotic and inefficient.”

The presentation creators’ inability to even spell the word ‘Blockchain’ correctly is perhaps a telling sign that the startup’s journey with the technology has come to faded end.

R3 was originally designed to investigate and roll out distributed ledger technology to global banking, leveraging Blockchain technology in a private, centralized environment to harmonize and add efficiency to a range of internal and external processes.

Nonetheless, the consortium remains buoyant about the future of so-called distributed ledger technology - or private, centralized Blockchains - saying that 2017 would be the year such technology sees its mainstream pilot.

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