Automation Technology Project of the Year: Exactpro and R3
Exactpro’s partnership with R3 and its Corda platform demonstrates how advanced automation technologies are essential to the development of new blockchain-based platforms for complex markets.
Exactpro’s specialisation in functional and non-functional testing for exchanges, clearing houses, depositories and other financial institutions that operate in complex markets made it an ideal partner for R3’s testing of its Corda Enterprise distributed ledger platform.
Launched in 2014, New York-based R3 is now involved in blockchain projects for markets ranging from the US cash equities markets, the FX interbank market, syndicate loans and Sukuk securities trading, in addition to working with leading markets infrastructure providers such as SIX Digital Exchange and CLS. Most recently, R3 and Nasdaq have announced a partnership which will integrate R3’s technology with the Nasdaq Financial Framework, which connects Nasdaq’s clients to services including matching engines, surveillance, data discovery and price reporting.
While there are still many questions about the potential of blockchain and what the “plumbing” of new digital marketplaces will look like and what the ultimate potential of blockchain will prove to be investment in distributed ledger technology has continued to grow, smaller players are being shaken out and the race is on to deliver and scale new business networks faster and realise efficiencies from scale and shared platforms.
“In the ideal world of tomorrow, there will be a shared ledger and a shared understanding of what is going on,” said Iosif Itkin, co-CEO and founder of Exactpro. “The central challenge of blockchain platforms is connecting financial participants while maintaining their privacy. Corda achieves this by segmenting access to data while maintaining consistency across its network.”
The principle underlying Corda from its creation as a platform for wholesale financial markets trades was that – unlike other blockchain networks, such as Ethereum – it did not share information about trades throughout its entire network, however many counterparties that might involve. Rather, the information in the platform is only available between the seller and the end-buyer, plus other parties with a legitimate need to know. “The Corda system is highly-distributed,” said Itkin, “it needs security, it is always evolving because there are upgrades to the nodes and the systems. Furthermore, everyone expects the financial network of the future to deliver high performance. So performance testing is also critical.”
Because Corda is designed to create trust between trading counterparties by allowing them to both share trading information via the nodes that connect them while maintaining their privacy and security, the number of tests increases exponentially with the number of market participants. More than 350 financial and non-financial firms are now part of the Corda “ecosystem” and the number of tests required also increases with the evolution of the platform with new releases and upgrades of Corda – which is available in open-source as well as enterprise versions.
“There are many challenges in testing distributed ledger platforms, including the interoperability of nodes in the network and the near infinite permutations of connections between them,” explained James Carlyle, CIO and head of production at R3. “It’s a challenge that expands into hundreds of millions of tests, and automation is the only viable solution.”
