According to the Wall Street Journal, the R3 CEV Blockchain consortium completed its biggest test yet of online distributed ledger systems, the organization is due to announce Wednesday. Forty banks tested five Blockchain vendors and three cloud providers, to see how different combinations handled simulated transactions in commercial paper.
The consortium of the world’s biggest banks has completed their second known proof of concept experiment of Blockchain technology and with this time, trials spanned five different Blockchain solutions.
The five companies that worked on the trial included Chain, Ethereum, Eris Industries, IBM and Intel and the cloud infrastructure was provided by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft Corporation.
“This is the first time many ledgers have been run in parallel by many institutions in a rigorous, scientific way,” said Tim Grant, R3’s managing director and global head of its collaboration lab, in an interview with CIO Journal.
The tests pointed to areas CIOs should evaluate before choosing vendors, Mr. Grant said.
For example, some ledger architectures allow for more complex transactions than others, he said. “It’s not clear there’s a well-defined playbook in how to evaluate these technologies side by side. We want to help bring that clarity,” he said.
Next, R3 plans to conduct similar tests with the participation of government regulators and tests for integrating blockchains with banks’ legacy transaction systems, Mr. Grant said.
