Corda Enterprise 4.7—Delivering Digital Value with Enterprise-Grade DLT

We close out 2020 with the on-time delivery of Corda 4.7, Corda Enterprise 4.7, and Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.5–the final releases of a busy year building out the Corda platform.

As we entered the ‘trenches of deployment’ through 2019 and into 2020, organizations deep into the delivery of Corda applications and networks wanted faster time to value, greater agility in deployment, and more advanced operational controls over Corda nodes and networks.

We are delighted to say that the ambitious roadmap to deliver against these demands has been shipped, quarter after quarter. The result? Well, Gartner reports based on an analysis of over 1000 projects in the market, over 40% of projects chose Corda for their multi-party digital transformation initiatives.

Business networks like the Italian Banking Association’s Spunta are starting to reap the value of core aspects of Corda’s distributed ledger, smart contracts, and intercompany workflow. Our focus on simplifying deployment and operations, connecting users and networks, and investing in our end-to-end digital asset capabilities, has been instrumental in shifting the conversation from innovation to business value in 2020.

Throughout 2020, the engineering team continued our focus of building market-leading resilience, performance, security, and operations into the Corda platform. Before we dive into the new features in the Q4 releases, let’s see how we stayed true to our mission of making Corda the leading platform for enterprise-grade blockchain applications this year.

2020 Recap

We started the year by fine-tuning performance, specifically focused on reduced transaction latency, supporting complex multi-party transactions where speed is critical to reducing settlement risk. We also introduced faster test network deployment and more streamlined and sophisticated node registration workflows.

The second quarter marked the first release with the contribution of our new team of engineers in Dublin. They helped us continue to deliver on our promise of ledger resilience, market-leading intercompany workflow, and deployment–introducing an all-new flow framework API, ledger recovery capabilities and more scalable deployments with Docker images and cloud templates.

Q3 saw the completion of flow framework enhancements, bringing more analytical capabilities around flows, and the introduction of new network permissioning capabilities directly from Corda.

Corda and Corda Enterprise 4.7

The latest release rounds out our work on enhanced ledger management and operations–providing more control over ledger data and operations.

Enhanced Ledger Management

As production CorDapps grow in size and maturity, nodes accumulate more and more ledger related data over their lifecycle. With new ledger archiving capabilities, ledger data can now be archived and safely stored elsewhere, enabling node operators to optimize how data is stored and preventing long back chains from impacting performance. This tool adds to the suite of enterprise utilities that now support the Corda ledger.

Platform Support for Chain Breaks

Corda Enterprise 4.7 introduces platform support for creating breaks in transaction chains. State owners can request a ‘break’ through a flow, with a guarantee that states are not removed without a replacement or duplicate. This provides the same privacy and performance benefits of chain snipping, but in a way that removes operational risk and ensures minimal development costs for CorDapp developers.

New Node Management GUI

The first version of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for node management focuses on flows–giving operators the ability to monitor and filter checkpoints and safely act on that information from the UI. Node operators gain a dedicated console to simplify the monitoring and management of nodes by bringing flow, node lifecycle, and configuration management into a single experience.

New Network Management GUI

This GUI builds on previous releases to deliver an interface for network managers to easily handle user-permissioning, lifecycle monitoring, changing network parameters, (e.g., introducing a new notary) and configuration management.

In addition, the platform provides:

  • New HSM APIs for a ‘plug-in’ HSM, enabling the integration of additional HSMs and covering all types of signing key–all while ensuring ongoing Corda Enterprise support for HSM integrations
  • Extended HSM support for confidential identities across all current supported HSMs to ensure key security, no matter the chosen HSM
  • New Business Network Extension enhancements allow for access control group reporting, batch onboarding, membership group querying, and a way to log and report actions to membership attestations
  • Notary performance improvements reduce the number of unnecessary retries during times of heavy traffic, providing a more accurate view of processing times to the operator

Check out the Corda Enterprise 4.7 factsheet for more information here.


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Looking ahead to 2021

As 2021 comes into focus, look out for new solutions to further accelerate time to value for distributed applications in different industries, and use cases across financial services and international trade. Future versions of Corda will see new tools for payments connectivity, wallets, an evolution of our trade finance capabilities, and a continued focus on digital currency initiatives. As introduced at CordaCon 2020, Corda Managed Services is already gaining tons of interest from CorDapp builders looking for fast time to market, so watch this space for more info or register your interest here.

Want to learn more about building scalable, private and secure multi-party applications on Corda? Be sure to visit corda.net, check out our community page to learn how to connect with other Corda developers, and sign up for our newsletters.