Blockchain consortium The Distributed Ledger Group (DLG), which is managed by R3CEV expects to license its technology as open sourced by early next year, according to R3CEV officials.

“We envision the construction of an open-sourced initiative, which would allow collaboration not only between member bank but also large technology companies, financial-infrastructure vendors, the buy side, and various distributed-ledger startups,” said Charley Cooper, managing director at R3CEV.

The DLG first must develop the initial fabric, which will provide everyone with common ground to build application further up the stack, he explained. “It is similar to what the TCP/IP protocol is to the Internet. If you try to build applications without the fabric in place, it is like decorating a bedroom before pouring the house’s foundation.”

Development of the code base is still in its early days, according to Cooper.

In the meantime, the DLG has launched a steering committee, along with architecture and legal and regulatory working groups. Over the next month, the consortium plans to launch a handful of use-case working groups after identifying and selecting use cases based on asset-class support, trade life-cycle issues, and legal/regulatory requirements.

As the DLG finalizes each use case, DLG officials expect to add new use cases over time. “If you focus on one use case, you certainly will miss a lot,” he explained. “One the other hand, if you try to build something broad without use cases then you risk trying to boil the ocean.”

Over the past two months, 25 financial institutions have joined the DLG providing not only capital but industry expertise as well. “We wanted to build a broad consortium that brought with it geographic and expertise with specific types of business,” said Cooper. “Currently, we have members with expertise in retail banking, custody, sales and trading, trade finance, mergers and acquisitions, and other businesses.”

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