It has been reported that R3’s proposal to USC’s bank members to build the blockchain consortium, Utility Settlement Coin (USC) on its own Corda platform instead of Clearmatics, has been unanimously rejected. The 17 member consortium cited that they could not discuss individual discussions with prospective partners for confidential reasons.
The proposal was made back in early June which replaced the founding platform of the project, Clearmatics with Corda. According to the sources, to swing the mood of the banks, R3 even offered to fund the technical development itself and to pay a share of legal fees. It offered to contribute over 20,000 lines of code and some dozens of reports on implementation models which is their sharable IP from projects done in collaboration with over 50 central banks, regulators, and commercial banks.
Source: cryptogoogle.io
"We believe in open standards for critical parts of blockchain market infrastructure, such as cash and value on ledger, because such standards will benefit the whole industry. Part of our role is to identify opportunities for discussion with potential partners.”, said Charley Cooper, a Managing Director at R3 discussing the matter in general.
After the initial rejection, R3 came up with a revised proposal where Clearmatics would be kept in the loop as well. They made an argument that the USC members and Clearmatics were at risk of forgoing an important opportunity to pool resources and create standards in a critical area of future market infrastructure. It suggested a way of moving ahead with the two technologies working together in a collaboration.
The USC project started back in 2015 as an initiative of Swiss banking giant UBS and Clearmatics and is currently at a pivotal stage as it moves into ‘Phase IIIb’ at the beginning of August, and the unanimous rejection is said to be the result of the timing of the proposal.
"I think the reason for the unanimity was less about the technology and more about the timeline of the process. (…) The vote came like literally a week or two before the closing of the legal documents for Phase IIIb and I think pretty much the attitude was, 'Let's not allow this approach by R3 to derail going into that phase or delay the project.' ”, said the source(s).