Singapore-headquartered fintech firm dltledgers is set to migrate its blockchain-based trade finance solutions to Corda from Hyperledger Fabric, marking another win for R3’s enterprise blockchain platform.

“We are ecstatic that one of the world’s fastest-growing trade digitisation platforms is moving to Corda,” says David Rutter, founder and CEO of R3. “dltledgers was one of the first businesses globally to pass the proof-of-concept stage, launching a full production trade solution in 2018. They have also successfully proven how different blockchains can interoperate, and can create transactional efficiency in trade and supply chain finance.”

In recent years, R3 and Hyperledger have emerged as market leaders in trade finance digitisation, providing the technology for many of the successful pilots and live transactions that have happened to date. However, R3 appears to be gaining the lead.

In 2019, fraud mitigation fintech Monetago, which works with organisations such as Swift and Singapore-based trade technology platform GUUD, a company of vCargo Cloud, left Hyperledger for Corda, citing data privacy, scalability, interoperability and developer productivity reasons. This came after the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative, B3i, a joint effort between 13 insurance and reinsurance companies to leverage blockchain for insurance, partnered with R3 to bring its solution into production on the Corda platform, leaving the Hyperledger Fabric framework on which it had developed its prototype.

More recently, the Bank of Thailand, which has been working on a proof of concept (PoC) on Hyperledger to enable corporates to use a digital baht for payments, reported “performance concerns” about the technology.

However, dltledgers is keen to stress that its move is not related to any failures on Hyperledger’s part.

“We’ve never had any performance issues with Hyperledger. We believe Hyperledger and Corda both have unique strengths and weaknesses, and we see advantages of being a platform that can run on both,” a dltledgers spokesperson tells GTR. “Having said that, we do see some technical advantages of Corda,” they add.

Among these advantages, dltledgers highlights the professional support offered by R3. “Where Hyperledger is a foundation, R3 is a company that’s driven by growth and adoption. We believe they can help us to grow the dltledgers user network, make it easier to interoperate with members of other private blockchain networks, and provide more robust technical support,” dltledgers says.

Another key factor influencing dltledgers’ decision involves privacy and scalability. “With Corda, transaction data is only shared with those who need to know,” the spokesperson says. “As a result, privacy is not threatened by the network scaling. Hyperledger Fabric’s channel architecture allows for private transactions between counterparties, but there is, however, a constant trade-off between throughput and level of privacy.”

By moving to Corda, dltledgers, which partnered with Bolero last year to add its electronic bill of lading (eBL) offering into its platform, will also be able to take advantage of R3’s new eBL solution, Corda eBL, which goes into beta in April. “Until now, the only part of executing a trade that couldn’t be done digitally with dltledgers was the bill of lading. We don’t have our own P&I Club-approved solution,” Farooq Siddiqi, CEO of dltledgers, told GTR last year.

While dltledgers has not indicated whether it will continue to partner with Bolero, its spokesperson says that, with R3’s new eBL functionality and rule book, the company “will be able to provide customers with even more options”.

dltledgers plans to move to Corda gradually over the next two years. In the meantime, the firm says it will focus on interoperability between the two permissioned frameworks.