Note

If you are new to the blockchain technology, taking our Introduction to Blockchain Technology self-paced course is highly recommended. Also, for a comprehensive coverage of blockchain development with Corda or mastering Java & Kotlin programming languages, taking our below self paced courses is highly recommended:

Corda

Corda is considered a private permissioned blockchain. It is a specific-purpose distributed ledger technology, built from the ground up, to support the financial and insurance industries. It focuses on transaction privacy using a shared immutable ledger that’s agreed upon by all parties through smart contracts.
To maintain the shared immutable ledger, Corda was built according to the following core concepts:

  • State objects: These are point-in-time facts about the data in the enterprise, like a stock or bond, or customers. It represents the current state of the facts and is updated through transaction processing.
  • Transactions: These represent the state transition of state objects through a life cycle. Corda employs a UTXO data model to reflect the state transition in the ledger. Both state objects and transactions are persisted in the enclave of a node, which can be any kind of database. A transaction must be validated by the contracts, which is a legal agreement in smart contracts between transacting parties.
  • Flows: These allow transacting parties to coordinate actions and complete transactions without a central controller.

In Corda, consensus is achieved in two ways:

  • One is transaction validity, which is the agreement in smart contract code between transacting parties, and includes all the signatures that are needed to authorize the transactions.
  • Another is transaction uniqueness to prevent double spending. Corda introduces the Notary concept to prove the transaction’s uniqueness.

Like Hyperledger, consensus in Corda is pluggable, which allows notary clusters to choose a consensus algorithm, fitting the needs of the business transactions. In Corda, a “notary” is an abstraction of an ordering service. A “notary cluster” is a collection of notary nodes using a consensus algorithm among them. This consensus algorithm may or may not be byzantine fault tolerance. Newer high-performance notary services, like crash fault tolerance (CFT) notary services were prototyped, which are based on Atomix, a light- weight Raft-based fault-tolerant distributed coordination framework.
A smart contract can be developed using Java, which is a good selling point for many enterprise developers since Java is a relatively dominant programming language. In fact, it can be written in any JVM language, for example, Kotlin or Scala, and has access to the full capabilities of the language.
Corda is supported by a network of Coda nodes, and only authorized nodes can join the network with permissions. The transaction is only accessible by the transacting parties, which ensures the transaction’s privacy.

Related Articles

If you like to explore more private distributed ledger platforms, reading the below articles is highly recommended:

This article is written in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a leading author of “Learn Ethereum: Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts” book. He has written 7 books on blockchain development.

Resources

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Self-Paced Blockchain Courses

If you like to learn more about Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Ethereum or Corda, taking the following self-paced classes is highly recommended:

  1. Intro to Blockchain Technology
  2. Blockchain Management in Hyperledger for System Admins
  3. Hyperledger Fabric for Developers
  4. Intro to Blockchain Cybersecurity
  5. Learn Solidity Programming by Examples
  6. Introduction to Ethereum Blockchain Development
  7. Learn Blockchain Dev with Corda R3
  8. Intro to Hyperledger Sawtooth for System Admins

 

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Articles and Tutorials on Blockchain Technology

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Articles and Tutorials on Hyperledger Family

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Articles and Tutorials on R3 Corda

If you like to learn more about blockchain development on Corda , reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:

 

Articles and Tutorials on Other Blockchain Platforms

If you like to learn more about blockchain development in other platforms, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended: