Corda - First Impressions

Today I was lucky enough to attend my first day of training on Corda, an "an open-source distributed ledger platform designed to record, manage and automate legal agreements between businesses".

Roger Willis and Richard Green did a fantastic job and I walked away excited for the 2nd day of training tomorrow. Between then and now I've got a whole load of thoughts/questions on my mind...

Corda isn't a traditional blockchain

Corda doesn't have the concepts of blocks or mining that you will find in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Transactions are purely point-to-point and validated individually in Corda. This stands opposed to the others which group up transactions and calculates a hash for all of them together (turning them into a block).

Immutability

What is there to stop the transaction history being modified? Well transactions are digitally signed and assuming all parties keep their private key safe, no one can realistically change history. On top of this, the ledger isn't reliant on mining and is designed to be immutable. This means that the only change parties expect to see is on current state.

Data Privacy

Transactions aren't broadcast globally to the entire network and only sent on a need-to-know basis. This protects against data leakage as parties in the network don't have free access to monitor who everyone is interacting with. Keeping the data contained also limits the damage if your private key is somehow compromised because your encrypted data isn't freely available to a potential attacker.