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Blockchain protocols

Discover key facts and figures about major blockchain protocols that are empowering transformations across industries.

An open-source blockchain platform that enables businesses to transact directly and in strict privacy using smart contracts.

Explore the features

Global event	CordaCon
Consensus	Single Notary, Raft, BFT-SMaRt
Public / Private / Permissioned	Public, Permissioned; Private, Permissioned
Smart contracts	Yes
Smart contract language(s) supported	Java, Kotlin
Transaction privacy	Yes
Transaction visibility	Private transactions between participants are hidden from all other participants.
Transaction ordering	Ordering provided by notary service as per consensus mechanism. In the BFT-SMaRt distributed notary, signatures from validating notaries can be specified in a customized manner.
Public Version	Corda OS 4.4
Consortium Version	Peer, Notary: Corda OS 4.5; NMS: 0.51
Corda Enterprise	Available on request, BYOL (bring your own license)

Fault tolerance

Single Notary

A single-node notary service that persists notarization requests in the network.

Raft

When using Raft deployed on n nodes, a Corda notary tolerates crashes of any t < n/2 of these nodes. Hence, at least 50% of the nodes must be running for the network to function.

BFT-SMaRt

For BFT-SMaRt to execute correctly, less than a third of all replicas of the service can be faulty at any moment. Hence, the total number of replicas n must be n >= 3f + 1, where f is the maximum number of faulty replicas.

Performance

Single Notary

Single Notary can be used for test networks and networks that do not have strict availability requirements.

Raft

Raft is not recommended for production.

BFT-SMaRt

BFT-SMaRt is a high-performance Byzantine Fault Tolerant State Machine Replication that relies on a leader to solve the classic Byzantine consensus problem that predates blockchains.

Suggestions for use with consortia

Single Notary

Single Notary can be used for networks that do not have strict availability requirements.

Raft

Raft on Corda has known limitations and is not recommended for production use.

BFT-SMaRt

BFT-SMaRt requires Java serialization which is disabled by default in Corda due to security risks, and it will only work in dev mode where this can be customized. There is no single shared ledger, only different shared vaults of facts between counterparties to a deal.