R3 is developing a blockchain-platformed operating system called Corda. A 100-plus member consortium of banks, regulators and technology partners are developing Corda and are led by blockchain tech start-up R3 CEV.
Corda is an open source blockchain project, designed for business from the start. Only Corda allows you to build interoperable blockchain networks that transact in strict privacy. Corda’s smart contract technology allows businesses to transact directly, with value.
Corda 3 is delivering the next platform stability keystones:
committing to the peer to peer protocols,
data formats, and the
test frameworks.
By stabilizing the peer to peer protocols they lay the groundwork for nodes of mixed versions to co-exist in a compatibility zone: with new nodes able to talk to old nodes and vice-versa.
In Corda 3, the network map node has been replaced with a network map document served over HTTP. At start-up, each node creates and signs a data structure called a nodeInfo. Each nodeInfo contains a node’s legal identities, IP addresses and other information.
The node uploads this file to the compatibility zone’s network map server (a compatibility zone is a set of nodes and services — notaries, oracles, doorman, network map server — that are configured within a larger Corda network to be compatible with each other). The node then downloads and caches the signed nodeInfos of all the other nodes in the compatibility zone from the same server, which it periodically polls for updates.
Why the switch to this new design?
* It’s highly available. The distribution of the nodeInfos can be offloaded to CDNs like Amazon CloudFront or Akamai, which are highly scalable, available and attack-resistant
* It’s tamper-proof. Man-in-the-middle attackers cannot tamper with the nodeInfos, since they are signed by the nodes themselves
[“Source-nextbigfuture”]
