Bloomberg had reported this past week that enterprise blockchain company R3 has held discussions with certain representatives at Ava Labs (which is known to be focused on the development of Avalanche), the Solana Foundation and Adhara regarding a possible minority investment in the company, or some type of joint venture or a complete sale.
R3’s Corda DLT has become one of the most popular enterprise chains.
R3 has several backers such as HSBC, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, ING and Itaü Unibanco. These banking institutions along with another 40 or so companies took part in a $107 million round back in 2017.
Then the year after that, the project acquired another $5 million in capital from forex central counterparty CLS.
However, following these capital injections, the firm had lost out on around $240 million in 2019 from XRP tokens.
R3 entered an agreement with Fintech firm Ripple in order to market Ripple products to R3’s banking clients. As a form of payment, the firm had received options over XRP tokens.
The two companies then had a disagreement regarding the deal, however, they reportedly settled the issue later on. Although the details of the reported settlement have not been shared publicly, some reports suggest that the XRP tokens that were involved had a market value of about $240 million.
Notably, around a year back, R3 had announced layoffs.
And in the past few months, additional team changes have been made with the resignation of a number of senior employees.
Company CTO Richard Gendal Brown is currently working on a part-time basis.
But sources cited by Ledger Insights claim that he still serves a key role in an advisory capacity to the CEO and the R3 Operating Committee.
It’s worthwhile to note that the firm’s Corda DLT is amongst the most popular permissioned chains in the institutional market with around 60 solutions currently deployed.
These reportedly include the SIX Digital Exchange which supports the Swiss National Bank’s CBDC, along with Euroclear’s D-FMI tokenization platform as well as collateral mobility company HQLAᵡ.
Bloomberg also reported that several Corda projects had been discontinued.
However, this could come down to technical design considerations and situations where software architects may be inclined to test the viability of other solutions.
Despite these developments, Corda did actually make substantial progress in various use-cases like for insurance and trade finance.
Radoslav Albrecht, Founder and CEO at Bitbond, recently noted that if R3 is currently seeking investors or a sale, then this might signal the end of private blockchains.
He said he was not too surprised. And that public chains are better in so many respects.
He argued that public chains are more “decentralized, secure, and transparent.”
He also explained that Public chains have “a much larger community of developers and users.” He pointed out that Public chains don’t create the overhead and “costs for running market infrastructure.”
In short, he recommends that if you need to use a blockchain, then just use a public chain.
However, these kinds of arguments lack the technical depth, kn0w-how, and insight that highly experienced software architects acquire after spending thousands of hours coding and debugging enterprise-grade applications. It’s very easy to make quick recommendations, but the best professionals to make these decisions are the ones who are have the real-world / hands-on experience to do so.
