R3's Hearn and Brown Say Enterprise Blockchain's Day of Reckoning Is Here

That about sums up the way R3's technical chiefs, CTO Richard Gendal Brown and lead platform engineer Mike Hearn, view the rivalry among enterprise blockchain solutions.

While it may be more genial and less chaotic than the public blockchain world that Hearn left behind when he quit work on bitcoin in 2016, enterprise tech is still a competitive business.

An enterprise blockchain "Shakeout" is well underway, said Brown, who before joining R3 spent 15 years as a banking expert at IBM and was also an advisor to a young and then-inexperienced Hyperledger.

Hearn told CoinDesk this period of reckoning will be wider than just the enterprise space, voicing serious doubts about ethereum in general.

In Hearn's view, this will result in minimal traction in the enterprise space as well as the loss of a lot of momentum in the public blockchain space.

Hearn went as far as saying all the time wasted on indecision and infighting in the public space means the really exciting and interesting technological work is happening in enterprise blockchain.

Brown pointed out that he and Hearn made some architectural decisions early on in the genesis of Corda that were viewed at the time as unusual or controversial and possibly unfashionable.

Some changes afoot in other areas of the enterprise blockchain space could be interesting to watch play out.

Hearn pointed out that Corda's intellectual origins are basically in bitcoin, more so than ethereum.

In a recent brainstorming session, Hearn said he was looking at a "Sort of Satoshi-style, free-floating token" on Corda with no issuer at all.