Corda blockchain development

The consortium of the world’s largest banks R3 developed and launched the Corda blockchain platform in November 2017.

Corda is an open source blockchain platform that simplifies the management of legal contracts and other shared information between mutually trusting parties. Corda was originally developed for use in financial institutions. There is also its commercial edition – Corda Enterprise.

Corda Enterprise extends the release of Corda and supports additional features, including support for commercial databases (Oracle, MSSql), HSM, performance improvements (parallel stream execution), high availability node configuration, and Corda network deployment tools.

The platform incorporates the best of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks. The Corda platform is designed to reduce costs in the implementation of various business operations. This is achieved due to the fact that companies can make transactions directly through the use of smart contracts. The latter, in turn, provide a high level of confidentiality and security of transactions.

Corda is a highly specialized tool designed for financial institutions. A key feature of Corda is that the platform does not use the blockchain in the usual sense of the word. Instead, special notary nodes are used. Transactions that are made on Corda are not broadcast to all its participants. Entries in the database are available only to those network members who have the right to view and manage them.

Key features

• Corda does not use cryptocurrency, however, its participants can tokenize their assets.
• Corda does not use the concept of mining and the Proof-of-Work system.
• Data transfer occurs only between the participants of the transaction/contract. There is no global broadcasting to all network nodes.
• There is no central controller managing all transactions.
• Corda supports various consensus mechanisms.
• Consensus is reached between the participants at the level of an individual agreement/contract, and not at the level of the entire system.
• The transaction is confirmed only by the participants related to it.
• Corda offers a direct link between formal human legal language and smart contract code.

Ledger

The concept of ledger in Corda is subjective. There is no single central data warehouse. Instead, each node maintains a separate database of facts known to it.
states

A state is an immutable object that is a fact known to one or more network nodes at a particular point in time. States can store arbitrary data, such as stocks, bonds, loans, and identification information.

The life cycle of a fact over time is represented by a sequence of states. When we need to update the current state, we create a new one and mark the current one as historical.

Transactions

Transactions are proposals for updating a ledger. They are not broadcast to all ledger members and are only available to those network members who have the legal right to view and manage them. A transaction will be added to the ledger if it is contractually valid, signed by all required participants, and does not contain double-spends.

Corda uses the UTXO (unspent transaction output) model, in which every ledger state is immutable. When creating a transaction, the state of the previous transaction (by hash and index) is passed to the output as input. Once a transaction is added to the ledger, the input states are marked as historical and cannot be used in future transactions.

Contracts

When we talk about the validity of a transaction, we mean not only the presence of the necessary signatures, but also the validity of the contract. Each transaction is associated with a contract that accepts it and validates the input and output states. A transaction is considered valid only if all of its states are valid. Contracts in Corda are written in any JVM language (for example, Java, Kotlin).

Flows

To automate the communication of network nodes, flows have been added. A flow is a sequence of steps that tells the node how to perform a particular ledger update, at what point it is necessary to sign and validate the transaction. Sometimes it takes hours, days until the transaction is signed by all parties and gets into the ledger. What happens if you disable the node participating in the transaction? Threads have checkpoints, at which the state of the thread is written to the host database. When a node is restored to the network, it will continue where it left off.

Consensus

To get into the ledger, a transaction must reach two consensuses: for validity and for uniqueness. The decision on the validity of a transaction is made only by the parties directly involved in it. Notary nodes check the transaction for uniqueness and prevent double spending.

Smart contracts offered by Corda are something new in the financial world and will have a positive impact on the development of the blockchain industry. In 2020, the auditing company Deloitte released an audit report, according to which Ethereum is inferior in some respects to VeChain and Corda networks.