Stan Higgins

A group of eight R3 member-banks have successfully tested a blockchain prototype that simulated the exchange of US Treasury bonds.

Though a familiar use case for the tech, the test is notable given that it used technology developed by Intel and unveiled earlier this year. Called ‘Sawtooth Lake’, the platform offers a compelling take on how secure hardware could play a role in distributed ledger architecture.

Intel vice president Jerry Bautista said in a statement:

“We believe collaborative exploration of blockchain usages is key to the development of this emerging technology.”

According to R3, the test involved the use of “non-cloud-based nodes” based in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America that were run by the banks as well as R3 and Intel. CIBC, ING Bank, HSBC, Scotiabank, Societe Generale, State Street, UBS and UniCredit took part in the test.

While a seemingly small detail, the statement hints at R3’s thinking on its project architecture and the issues it believes may be inherent should financial institutions seek to host blockchain networks in the cloud.

Statements given by R3 head of research Tim Swanson at the Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai last week build on this idea further as he cautioned that “the cloud” is perhaps best conceived as a fancy word for “other people’s computers”.

“Magic internet chains, magic internet coins, whatever the buzzword du jour is, no matter how you cut these systems, they are cryptographic data stored on a cloud,” he told the audience. “If you have to rely on an outside party, you still have to depend on these organizations to handle uptime and maintenance. There’s no blueprint for that.”

The comments come at a time when cloud providers including IBM and Microsoft are demonstrating an increasing interest in blockchain technology.