R3 Corda enters public beta

It means all those people waiting for a technology that is fit for purpose now have certainty: Corda is here for the long-term and you can adopt it with confidence.

In this post, I announce our first public beta of Corda – and share some thoughts on an exciting announcement from our newest partner, HP Enterprise. Bottom line: if you haven’t already started building on Corda, now is the time to start.
Corda running on HPE NonStop

News on the beta in a moment but first some exciting news from our partners at HPE, who this week demonstrated Corda running on their HPE Integrity NonStop Platform. You can read more about the announcement here. This is a big deal: our vision for Corda is that companies use it to record, manage and automate the contracts and other agreements they have with their trading partners and counterparts. That is a broad vision and entails deep integration with core systems. Proving deployment of Corda on HPE’s NonStop platform, on which so many of the world’s most trusted companies run their most important applications, is a major step forward.
Corda First Public Beta Releases This Week

Now back to the beta…

In the six months since the open sourcing of Corda in November 2016, our development team and extended community have been hard at work enhancing the codebase. This public beta represents another step forward in our path towards API stabilisation for production applications. Our new docsite is here, the code is here and you can download the DemoBench here.

The beta is also a good point to reflect on the big steps forward since the open-sourcing of Corda:

An industry-leading vault – supporting soft-locking, direct SQL queries, automated population of relational tables and streaming updates in order to deliver the industry’s most productive DLT programming model.
BFT Notary Clusters – delivery of a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) decentralised notary, based on the BFT-SMaRT protocol and demo. Contrary to some mistaken press reports, Corda’s consensus mechanism is fully distributed…!
Corda Shell – enables developers and node administrators to easily command the node by running flows, RPCs, and SQL queries, and monitor the node’s activities. Type “flow watch” at the Corda shell and watch your node at work…
Inter-node workflows (the flow framework) – the industry’s only framework for automating communication and negotiation between nodes across the network. Flows now also support versioning, laying the ground-work for nodes to run multiple versions of the same flow at the same time, increasing support for backwards-compatibility. This is all part of making Corda the easiest DLT platform to manage in real production settings.
Identity – an implementation of X.509 identity standards, to enable interoperability with other systems, and support for confidential identities.
Increased performance – multiple performance upgrades, including higher memory efficiency, better RPC performance and ability to send larger messages.
The Corda Explorer and DemoBench – watch this video to learn how to run real Corda nodes on your own machine, with a single click, and see the power of the Corda architecture for yourself.
Security – readying the key management service to support the use of Hardware Security Modules for key storage.

We’ve also responded to feedback from the community to simplify how flows are registered and how developers achieve multiple signatures for a transaction – eliminating the need for 150 lines of code per flow! Keep the feedback coming and together we’ll make Corda even better.

We’ve been proving Corda with our members on our TestNet, the world’s first long-running, permissioned, general purpose distributed ledger network. And we plan to open this up to everybody in the coming months. Join our Slack to join the conversation and watch our blog for announcements.

Corda has proven to be a hugely popular platform for building distributed ledger applications, with the Corda developer community growing extensively since the codebase was first open sourced – dedicated Corda Meetups all over the world, thousands of active members on our Slack, and developers trained all over the world through our oversubscribed training programmes.

If you haven’t seen Corda for yourself, this short video shows you what you’re missing. You can also watch our training videos, read our extensive ‘getting started’ documentation, and use the ground-breaking Corda DemoBench to help your colleagues and clients understand the value. All this and more is accessible via corda.net.
What’s next?

This beta is an important milestone. It represents the last major checkpoint before we stabilise our APIs and announce full version 1.0. Unlike some other codebases, “1.0” means something very significant to us: it will be the point at which we commit to API compatibility. You will be able to take apps you deploy on 1.0 and migrate them to run on future versions of Corda unchanged. That is a massively important and bar-raising promise to make and we take it seriously. The team doesn’t get to say Corda is at 1.0 until it hits that bar.

But we also know that few other platforms hold themselves to that standard and Corda is already more mature, stable and productive than many other distributed ledger platforms out there.

And that’s why today’s Beta announcement is so important. If you haven’t already started building your production Corda applications, now is the time to join all the other firms who are already building sophisticated offerings on Corda.

Start at corda.net, access the docs and sign up for training.
We love our partners

As should be clear by now, R3 is an enterprise software company, with the Corda platform at our heart. And that means something important: it means opportunity for you.

If you’re a blockchain startup or a FinTech startup more generally or an independent software vendor or consulting firm or systems integrator, the Corda platform is the enterprise DLT solution for you and your clients.

We’re not building applications or “top of stack” solutions; that’s where you come in.
We’re not delivering complex solutions for clients; that’s where you come in.

So it’s no surprise that so many of the world’s startups, ISVs and SIs also see the power of a truly open platform and why they’re flocking to build on Corda. We would love to partner with you too.