Earlier today our architecture team released its first public whitepaper on Corda.

The WSJ covered it here and here.

Consequently I am somewhat puzzled by news stories that still refer to a “blockchain” as “Bitcoin technology.”  After all, we don’t refer to combustion engines in cars as “horse-powered technology” or an airplane turbine engine as “bird-powered technology.”

A more accurate phrase would be to say something like, “a blockchain is a type of data structure popularized by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.”  After all, chronologically someone prior to Satoshi could have assembled the pieces of a blockchain into a blockchain and used it for different purposes than censorship-resistant e-cash.  In fact, both Guardtime and Z/Yen Group claim to have done so pre-2008, and neither involves ‘proof-of-work.’

Fun fact: Corda is not a blockchain, but is instead a distributed ledger.