R3 THE GLOBAL LEADER IN BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY EXPANDS ITS PRESENCE TO BULGARIA

What would happen if banking institutions, companies and individuals had access to a wide, efficient and outright better infrastructure within which to use their money? What if transactions were safer and faster?

These are some of the questions we asked ourselves when R3 was founded. And in the time since, we have built two of the world’s leading enterprise solutions for regulated markets, Corda and Conclave.

R3 is a leading provider of enterprise technology and services that enable direct, digital collaboration in regulated industries where trust is critical. Multi-party solutions developed on our platforms harness the “Power of 3”— R3's trust technology, connected networks and regulated markets expertise—to drive market innovation and improve processes in banking, capital markets, global trade and insurance.

David Rutter

As one of the first companies to deliver both a private, distributed ledger technology (DLT) application platform and confidential computing technology, R3 empowers institutions to realize the full potential of direct digital collaboration. We maintain one of the largest DLT production ecosystems in the world, connecting over 400 institutions, including global systems integrators, cloud providers, technology firms, software vendors, corporates, regulators, and financial institutions from the public and private sectors.

And we are incredibly excited to expand our presence in Bulgaria, which has an immense pool of professional talent and technical expertise.

Our Story

In 2015, David E. Rutter and Todd McDonald initially founded R3 as a consortium of nine banks committed to leveraging DLT. The bank participation quickly grew from 9 to 60. Shortly thereafter, with the support of the participating banks, R3 pivoted from a consortium to an enterprise software and services firm and, in 2017, secured the largest ever USD investment for DLT.

Todd McDonald

Flash forward to 2022, R3 is now leading the next generation of digital finance by powering new distributed solutions that unlock greater potential by delivering the Power of 3, only from R3.

Power of 3, only from R3: Enabling end-to-end development of scalable high-value solutions:

• Trust Technology: People need to be able to believe in the technology they use. They need platforms that work and work well. We back up our claims and deliver privacy and security through what we call “Digital trust, delivered.”

• Connected Networks: Solutions built on the Corda platform gain access to the Corda network, including the direct transfer of documents across participating business networks. In fact, the platform allows for the registration, validation, and exchange of documents on Corda’s own network, which can then be distributed across the networks that have opted into the process, making management significantly easier because companies only need to work with a single network directly.

• Regulated Market Expertise: Building a business that is fully operational and efficient is only the first step. Interacting with regulatory authorities in a way that’s effective and meaningful is just as important. The software has tools tailored to this, and the team at R3 has deep expertise when it comes to regulatory compliance. Both are at your disposal.

To date, our technology is being utilized by institutions across the globe, both small and large, including Swiss Post, Morgan Stanley, ING, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Allianz, Credit Suisse, Nasdaq, MetLife, SAP, Microsoft, Accenture, Intel and many more.

Enterprise Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies

Blockchain will perhaps be most known to many readers as the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies, but its greatest potential lies in its implementation in other forward-thinking technologies and industries.

It is a type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which is the broader category. DLT is decentralized, meaning that all information is spread out between the parties that are participating in a transaction, making it significantly more secure and difficult to hack by bad actors.

The other core principle is immutability–if any action is taken on the blockchain, it is immortalized and can not be changed by anyone, ever. This is a further security protocol that means that absolutely no one can change an action after it has become part of the chain. Furthermore, keeping information immutable builds trust between partners, which is an essential thing to foster in a business.

Of course, this all happens in real-time, and that by itself can amount to immense savings, especially when you factor in the lack of need for paper documentation going forward.

There are numerous other benefits, including simplified processes for complying with regulatory bodies, earning financing, and a lot more. To summarize, it can change everything for a business and level the playing field between smaller and medium-sized companies and the big players, giving you access to tools that used to be out of reach.

Corda & Conclave

R3’s Corda is a scalable, permissioned peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed ledger technology (DLT) or blockchain application development platform that enables the building of multi-party applications that foster and deliver digital trust between parties in regulated markets.

Corda’s architecture includes capabilities, such as smart contracts for modeling digital assets and currencies, distributed business logic, network enablement with identities, memberships and permissions, as well as a private, scalable P2P network.

So, for example, let us say you want to notify only specific parties, such as regulators when changes to a transaction occur. Corda does not share a full copy of the ledger with each of the participants. Instead, each transaction is shared on a need-to-know basis, so only those participating in a transaction will have it written in their respective ledgers. The moment a third party enters this transaction, everyone else who has been involved will also be notified.

Because everything is automated and agreed on through smart contracts, systems built on Corda easily facilitate notaries to watch over these processes. It is all incredibly efficient and completely transparent – for the people who need to know.

Conclave was launched last year, and it is our implementation of Intel’s Enclave (aka SGX) technology. It is not bound to a specific operating system but is truly cross-platform, comes with an easy-to-use API, and is also available for more modern programming languages, such as Kotlin and JavaScript.

Conclave combats fraud by pooling together multiple private data sets to increase the likelihood of intercepting malicious activity. That data is still secure, too, and is only processed as part of a larger data set and not individually viewable. Similar solutions can also be implemented for market data aggregation and secure order matching.

Powerful analytics tools for each of these and other scenarios are also available, meaning that data privacy is not the only benefit anymore – it also means something in context.

Expansion into Bulgaria, Partnership With INDUSTRIA

R3 currently operates in New York, London, Dublin, Hong Kong, Mumbai, São Paulo, Singapore and Tokyo, and we’re incredibly excited to introduce Bulgaria to R3. Bulgaria is already a significant part of the global fintech ecosystem, and its talent is well respected across the globe, working for and shaping almost every major player in IT.

We wanted to both tap into that pool as well as expand our presence in Europe, so choosing Bulgaria for our new R&D hub was not a particularly difficult choice.

After partnering with INDUSTRIA for a number of years on very essential projects for both sides, we’re thrilled to be partnering once again with the team for this new hub. INDUSTRIA is a company we value and trust, making them an ideal partner to be managing the hub.

We frequently organize knowledge-sharing events together with INDUSTRIA that are open to anyone, so if you’re interested in learning more about the technologies and solutions we provide, we’d love to see you there.

People working for the R&D hub will have the opportunity to work on both existing and upcoming R3 projects, so that is something we are very excited about.

In the near future, we’re looking to expand operations in Bulgaria with even more positions, but we’re actively looking for developers as of right now. If working with industry-leading DLT and forward-thinking data security solutions sound good to you, we’re happy to talk and get to know you.

Bulgaria Has a Place in the Future of Finance

With regards to the changing landscape of business, finance is an industry that has always strived to be flexible, and yet it is not easy to just uproot and disrupt the entire world’s approach to transactions, security, and efficiency.

So we made it easy to use and switch to bleeding-edge technology through our products.

Corda allows for easy deployment of blockchain for businesses of any size and in any industry. Corda has already been used to revolutionize capital markets, digital assets and digital currencies. Corda is not only scalable but incredibly efficient, and the platform is already being adapted to an even wider range of use cases.

Meanwhile, Conclave offers numerous improvements on previous Confidential Computing implementations and is even used by Intel, the originator of the technology.

And Bulgaria will have a key role in developing both these technologies going forward.

www.r3.com