1 Introduction

At R3, we believe that distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform the financial services industry to the benefit of its clients and participant firms alike. We envision a future where financial agreements are recorded and automatically managed without error, where anybody can transact seamlessly for any contractual purpose without friction. We believe markets will move towards models where parties to financial agreements record them once and collaborate to maintain accurate, shared records of these agreements. Duplications, reconciliations, failed matches and breaks will be things of the past. Isolated islands of asset representations will be no more. We aspire to define a shared ledger fabric for financial services use-cases that can be deployed within existing legal frameworks and which relies on proven technologies. Our philosophy can be broken down into three categories: engineering for the requirements of institutions, a focus on non-functional requirements, and extensibility. This paper introduces the design features of the Corda platform which we believe make it an attractive choice for regulated financial institutions.a