In Blockchain News: R3 Releases Corda, Chris Larsen Talks Ripple

Welcome to another crazy week in cryptocurrency! There’s been a lot for blockchain enthusiasts to digest this week, but let’s start with consortium news.

The R3CEV blockchain consortium of banks opened its Corda codebase up to the larger developer community this week, in the hopes that independent experiments based on the open-source code would lead to better innovation.

The move prompted mixed reactions from the cryptocurrency world and comes after the news that several banks have left R3 or have chosen not to participate in its latest round of funding—which, according to cross-border firm PayCommerce founder and chairman Abdul Naushad, could possibly be attributed to a shaky internal structure.

“Really the common purpose of the [R3] consortium is the technology aspect, which could be problematic for R3’s business model,” says Naushad. “Innovation has to be driven by a business objective; Goldman Sachs is coming in with that [business] mindset.”

This clarity of structure might explain why the Hyperledger project has been expanding, growing its membership to a healthy 100 members, while banks continue to waffle on R3.

According to Naushad, the interoperability of such technology—especially when it comes to services such as cross-border transfer–is now a necessity as the world of financial transactions is changing.

This was highlighted by Ripple co-founder and CEO  (for now) Chris Larsen, on Quora:

Larsen wrote:

Global transactional demands are changing, and the current financial system is woefully inadequate to meet tomorrow’s payment needs and opportunities. This is especially true with regards to low-value payments, which are unprofitable for banks and too costly for customers. Companies of all sizes are increasingly global from day one and need to provide on-demand delivery of services.

In other blockchain news, a federal court has granted the IRS the authorization necessary to serve a summons to Coinbase to learn the identities of U.S. taxpayers using virtual currency on the network, as, according to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, financial transactions that take place in virtual currency like bitcoin are “taxable just like those in any other property.”