There has been a bit of press about this, since it was ‘announced’ via a paywalled article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago (whatever happened to good old press releases, they worked just fine).

I just wrote a bit about it, having determined from the company that the planned patent covers the Corda distributed ledger software. It seems its ability to restrict access to data to just those that have access rights to it — and one can imagine why that’s a must for financial markets players — is something that R3 wants to protect via patent law.

The patent was a tiny surprise to me, as the company had recently indicated it was looking to open source its offering. I guess it might still end up doing that in some way. The devil will be in the detail of the patent once it’s made available. And R3 remains a member of the open source Hyperledger Project.
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Corda is part of a bigger development that R3 is working on, called Concord, and elements of that should appear in the next few months. Patent or not, the long-term future for Corda will likely be one of commoditization (just as has happened with messaging middleware and big data platforms), while the money will be in the value added components to ease deployment, in integration and in business applications.

This is a term that reputedly came out of Microsoft in the 1980s — apparently commonly used (and practised) by the great Dave Cutler —and refers to a company that makes use of its own products to run its business.

It’s a direction that the WSBA and Positrust are taking with implementing the WSBA Certification Framework as it rolls out. In short, the WCF will be using blockchain technology to support tamper proof content dissemination and authenticated certificate issuance. It will be of practical use and also is a great way for candidates to learn about real-life uses of blockchain.

This application of blockchain might seem a bit contrived, but efforts are underway to have WCF subject to both national and international accreditation, so this level of security and due process will be important to establish the framework as credible for all stakeholders, including candidates, employers, recruiters, etc.
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There’s more information in the press release here. WCF courses are scheduled for the next few weeks and registration is open.