`

The Weekend Read: August 28

We will be back to our scheduled programming with Todd McDonald after Labor Day. This week we have a guest post by Kathleen Breitman.

1. Flight of the Concord

This week, our team published a non-technical introduction to Corda, our platform for recording and managing financial agreements.  The publication of this paper coincided with a piece published in The Wall Street Journal about our ambitions to unite actors in the financial services industry. Both pieces are extremely informative and I encourage everyone to read them. I'll pull this quote from a related piece in WSJ's MoneyBeat:

It may seem like a fine-grain point, but the fact that contracts and transactions on Concord are not visible was a key challenge to designing a product the banks would actually use. Getting to that point, in fact, was the entire reasoning behind the firm’s strategy, which involved forming a consortium of banks first, getting their input and tapping their resources, and designing the product as a result of that collaboration. It’s the opposite approach of most startups, which tend to build a product and release, and then look for a customer base.

2. Utility Coin

Another big headline in the "blockchain in capital markets" space was the announcement of a consortium around a "Utility Settlement Coin" (USC), spearheaded by Robert Sams of Clearmatics. Early articles and press releases are a little too scant on the details of implementation for me to weigh in, but I look forward to learning more as Robert's published work has impressed me in the past. I wonder, for example, how close it will look and feel to our ongoing Project Jasper. 

Other Items of Note