R3 has just made its Corda distributed ledger platform open source, granting the developers access to its source code to encourage collaboration, review and contribution to the platform. This news comes at a time when R3 needs it most, after it recently lost a few of its member banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Corda was built in close collaboration with over 70 banks and financial institutions and, as they point out, by far the biggest collaborative effort of its kind in this space. It is said to be heavily inspired by blockchain systems, but with design choices that make it able to meet the needs of regulated financial institutions.

Crucially, Corda restricts access to data within an agreement to only those who need to validate it. Financial agreements on Corda take the form of smart contracts “linking business logic and data to associated legal prose in order to ensure that the financial agreements on the platform are rooted firmly in law.”

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David Rutter, CEO of R3, comments: “The successful application of distributed ledger technology to financial services relies on new solutions being able to integrate and work seamlessly with each other, otherwise the disjointed infrastructure financial markets are forced to operate with today will simply be replicated with different technology.

The applications being built therefore need to be based on common, open, interoperable platforms – much like the common protocols on which the internet operates today. Open sourcing Corda is the next step in making Corda one of these platforms”.

By offering free access to its code R3 is now matching the open source blockchain platform of IBM, Hyperledger fabric.