Be Curious” Its something new and different, Let’s talk something interesting about Corda here.
We live in an era where technology is blooming quite fast. Yet leaving in a prosperous society, we still lack a lot of features in our daily lives and businesses. Our businesses run on legacy networks that can’t store records without making any errors; it takes days to process a transaction and cyber-attacks are a daily occurrence.
In a time like this, blockchain technology emerged as a knight with shining armor. The decentralization structure and the heavy security measures created a revolutionary technology that can get rid of all the flaws in our business models. But to make this technology more applicable in the enterprise sector, it needs to have more features. That’s why many enterprise blockchains started to emerge.
What is Corda?
Corda is a Distributed Ledger Technology to be used by businesses, such as financial institutions, to keep a shared ledger of transactions and remove the need for involved parties to constantly check that each of their books is in line after interacting with each other. This is the primary problem that Corda is trying to solve.
Following from this, since it is designed to allow interacting parties to make sure they are all in line, it also removes the need for all parties on the Corda network to know about each and every transaction, as only those involved are interested in them. Both of these points really need to be expanded upon, and to do this, we need to take a proper look into the problems Corda is attempting to solve, so we can fully understand why Corda chose to make these fundamental decisions.
Benefits of Corda
Some of the important benefits offered by Corda are:
- Privacy- Transaction history on the Corda ledger is fully encrypted. Transaction data is not shared with everyone. It is shared only with necessary parties.
- Agile and flexible- Corda is an agile and flexible platform that helps meet business needs. It is easy for organizations to migrate to a Corda enterprise based on the business requirements that arise.
- Interoperability- Businesses must be able to transact directly, securely, and seamlessly. All versions of Corda are free and commercial which means that they can interoperate with each other on a Corda network.
- Open development- It comprises of a robust community of developers working on added features, functionality, and enhancements.
- Open design- Corda, as we know, is an open-source platform. Openness is a constant and notable feature of the collaborative group of firms constantly work to deliver blockchain suitable for any business.
Why Did Corda Make Transactions Limited Only to Parties Within the Transaction?
First, we need to understand why blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin make all of their transactions public. One of the main attractions of blockchains is being trustless, meaning that I don’t need to trust you personally (or anyone else) to still trust that all the transactions on the chain are valid. This is possible due to all transactions being public once they are included in a block and will remain that way permanently. For a bad actor to alter a transaction after it has been included in a block, it is almost impossible as it will require copies of the block on all other nodes in the network to be changed before the next block is added to the chain.
The downside that comes with this is that every party using that blockchain must keep a local copy of the chain themselves so that when a new block is added to the chain, all parties receive the update and kept in the same state.
Performance and scalability are greatly impacted by making a system trustless. For example, Ethereum currently requires every node to process all transactions and store the state of accounts and contract code. This reduces the possible throughput of all nodes on the network to that of a single node. If this model remains, the same then as the number of users increases the average time that a user waits for their transaction to be mined can only go up.
Due to this problem, possible ways to improve the performance of the network are being looked into; the Ethereum Raiden Network and Bitcoin Lightning Network are both aiming to vastly increase both the performance and scalability of their respective systems.
Corda is not trustless. That does not mean it moves to the other end of the scale, but some trust is explicit as a party’s identity must be known to join an existing Corda network. Furthermore, the parties on the network must trust the issuers of assets onto the ledger that they themselves are moving around within transactions. This is where the requirement of trust ends. The parties themselves do not need to trust each other. Between the ledger keeping everyone in step, the fact that each of their identities is known by the network certificate authority provides some backup guarantee in case of any nefarious behavior.
One Use Case of Corda – Finance
The immutability and transparency of a Corda blockchain help empower financial institutions for gaining fast and secure access to up-to-date customer data. This results in increased operational efficiency, reduced labor-intensive data gathering, operational costs, and processing time, and increased trust between institutions. The advantages provided by Corda for financial institutions are:
· Transaction finality.
· Ability to scale.
· Privacy.
· Legally identified parties.
· Developer productivity and enterprise integration.
My experience while learning CORDA: The step-by-step learning curve was so overwhelming [frustrating sometimes ?] as a beginner, give up way before even develop my interest in the technology. “But Spending More Time Practicing Things I Find Difficult” could work.
Shortly, its an investment and If you are motivated enough and interested, you can learn new skills at any age.
If you’re interested in learning Corda, do check-out the links below:
Official R3 Corda documentation
Conclusion
I hope you have now gained a fair idea about the Corda blockchain and its use cases. To know all about the Corda blockchain and become a Corda expert keep in touch with me over LinkedIn. I am a Corda certified developer.
