Corda 3.2

Katelyn Baker in Corda

Unless your recent abode has been located below a formation of solidified magma it won’t have escaped your attention that last week, the 10th July to be precise, R3 released Corda Enterprise. That was a significant achievement for the company, and the blockchain industry as a whole: a commercial distribution of Corda, with all the design choices and business-friendliness you’ve come to expect from Corda and a bunch of shiny bells and whistles to make it even easier to deploy in complex corporate environments.

Hot on the heels of that launch we are releasing Corda 3.2 to the open source community. We’re rolling up a few critical bug fixes, and taking the opportunity to deliver stable versions of tools that have been frequently requested, as well as fixes that ensure interoperability with the aforementioned Enterprise release. More info here on how to upgrade from previous versions.

This is important because, at its core, Corda is a platform that gives the facility to untrusting parties to interact and contract with one another to reach a final state of consensus where all parties can trust in the outcome without trusting one another and without the need for expensive out of band reconciliation. The value of systems built atop it is in the seamless interaction of flows settling contracts and the exchange of states, states that are assured to remain valid and readable for the life of the system using them. And these systems may be running on a mixture of Enterprise and Open Source nodes: hence the absolute importance of compatibility.

The most important of the included bug fixes are those that address issues with Corda Nodes joining and interacting with production compatibility zones running Network Map and Doorman services. As applications developed atop Corda move into production joining such networks becomes more important, moving away from dev mode and self signed certs into a more robust BFT enabled infrastructure with a proper root of trust and enforced identity uniqueness.

Part of that journey is the existence of a network to join. With the imminent launch of the R3 Corda TestNet, Corda 3.2 nodes can interact on an equal footing to those running Corda Enterprise. Once the Corda Network (as detailed here) is live, the environment will be in place for a robust and exciting global network of interacting nodes. Corda 3.2 is another step toward being a part of that.

In addition, the Blob Inspector tool has been made available in the past but this is the first release in which it’s shipping alongside Corda. It is particularly useful for understanding data that a Corda node stores in serialized form, such as the signed NodeInfo files and Network Parameters.

The Corda Network Builder, in contrast to the public networks discussed above, is a tool for those looking at creating private, developer oriented, test networks. Using a graphical interface, it simplifies the distribution of self signed NodeInfos and the management of trust root distribution and the developer certificates included with the open source codebase. Using the Network Builder allows for the seamless creation of Nodes and Notaries, either locally via a Docker image or within the Azure cloud.

Templates can be defined as one would expect of any orchestration process to define roles and CorDapp bundles with specific instances of those template spun up and their identity distributed throughout the test environment in moments. In this way, it becomes much easier to deploy your CorDapps in a well structured test environment.

Finally, and really most importantly, we have at last managed to make two consecutive releases which follow a common naming scheme. 3.2-cordafollows on from 3.1-corda.Corda