We are very excited to announce the availability of R3’s Corda on Microsoft Azure, only a few weeks after its release to the open source community.  With the addition of Corda to Project Bletchley, we continue to expand our distributed ledger platform support on Azure to enable the next generation of distributed business applications.

Today, R3 published a virtual machine image in the Azure Marketplace to easily and quickly deploy a multi-member Corda demo network on a single VM.  This offering demonstrates the capabilities of Corda through real world scenarios, including an interest rate swap deal and Standard Initial Margin Model (SIMM) valuation. This is the first click-stop of many towards R3’s financial-grade distributed ledger platform offering on Azure.

As Richard G Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, describes “Corda is a distributed ledger platform designed from the ground up to record, manage and synchronize financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios.  By making simple Corda demos available on the Azure Marketplace, R3 and Microsoft are making it easy for newcomers to experience Corda for themselves before joining the community.”

Some of Corda’s key design choices include:

• Designed for Business: Recording and management of financial transactions, within existing legal and regulatory frameworks
• Privacy First: Data sharing restricted to entitled participants of a transaction
• Modular Consensus: Support for multiple consensus algorithms

For additional information, you can download the technical white paper.

Try out the Corda distributed ledger demo on Azure to gain insight for your business process development and let us know what you think!  Do not hesitate to leave a comment with questions, feedback, or additional requests as you begin.