Blockchain-for-Banks Startup Switches From Hyperledger to R3's Corda

MonetaGo, a software development company that builds private blockchains for financial institutions and central banks, has decided to change its underlying architecture from Hyperledger Fabric to R3's Corda platform.

The New York-based firm, which has been testing its blockchain-based anti-fraud platform for receivables financing in India, cited concerns with how Hyperledger Fabric would scale up once large numbers of participants joined the system.

"As we looked at the different scalability pieces of Hyperledger, we saw that it could get challenging, at least at the current throughput of Fabric. So we started doing some testing on Corda and realized, at least in this specific case, it made a lot of sense."

Specifically, Hyperledger uses numerous channels, or "Subnets," to ensure the privacy of data shared between parties on the blockchain.

A former bitcoin exchange that pivoted to enterprise software, MonetaGo had already been working with Corda to automate the issuance of commercial paper, yet another reason to make the change, Chenard said.

David E. Rutter, R3's founder and CEO, said in a statement: "We're excited to see the network running in production on Corda Enterprise with a number of our member banks in Mexico."

In April of last year, MonetaGo announced that its receivables financing blockchain on Hyperledger Fabric was being tested in conjunction with the Reserve Bank of India.

This is not the first time organizations that have been building on Hyperledger have changed their minds and moved to R3 Corda.

Trade on the Hyperleder Fabric side and Marco Polo and Voltron using Corda.

"The trade finance solutions we are really looking at are Voltron and Marco Polo and we began to think, 'wouldn't it be great if you were writing this stuff natively for Corda, rather than trying to figure out how to connect Hyperledger and Corda and vice versa?'".