Private Blockchain's Biggest Startups Integrate in Unprecedented Tie-Up
A historic change in strategy is taking place at R3 and Digital Asset (DA), who are now collaborating to maximize their respective blockchain ecosystems.
A historic change in strategy is taking place at R3 and Digital Asset (DA), who are now collaborating to maximize their respective blockchain ecosystems.
Announced Tuesday, DA will be bringing its smart contract language DAML (Digital Asset Modelling Language) to R3’s Corda platform, as well as Hyperledger Fabric, following on from its Hyperledger Sawtooth tie-up last month.
DA co-founder Yuval Rooz had a tough act to follow, taking over as CEO from Wall Street legend Blythe Masters, who suddenly departed the company in December of last year.
He told CoinDesk:
Another rather interesting partnership DA is kicking off is with Amazon Aurora, a non-blockchain traditional cloud database – driven by strong customer demand, said DA.
This echoes the AWS Quantum Ledger Database, which is also centralized and makes no pretensions towards being a bonafide blockchain. Rooz said he predicts more tie-ups between DAML and centralized database providers.
“We could actually capture a big piece of distributed applications today,” he said.
Stepping back
Stepping back to circa 2014-2015, firms like DA and R3 became pitted against one another, courting the same customers, and reminding them not to get caught in a Betamax versus VHS situation.
There also seemed to be a game of musical advisors playing out, as R3’s current CTO Richard Gendal Brown and Clearmatics head of research Tim Swanson advised the pre-Linux Foundation Hyperledger, which was acquired by Blythe Masters and Digital Asset Holdings as it was known then.
Later, Brown and Swanson joined R3 full time.
Dan O'Prey, CMO and head of DAML Community at DA, was also a co-founder of Hyperledger and remembers that back in the early days “out of necessity all companies looked like full stack providers so they had to build the ledger, they had to build the environment for smart contracts and solutions.”
The natural evolution of the blockchain space has required a change of strategy among firms noted O’Prey. For example, R3 made the strategic decision to focus on the platform with Corda, while DA is focused on a different layer of the stack, he said, adding:
Todd McDonald, R3 co-founder, and chief product officer agreed with this sentiment, but also highlighted how personality might have helped play a part. He told CoinDesk:
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
R3's Todd McDonald image via CoinDesk archives