In the past year, the blockchain-a consortium of R3, which we repeatedly wrote, said that he intends to raise funding of $200 million. Now close to the R3 the sources told reporters the Fortune that this figure is out of date: it refers to has canceled plans to sell shares in the research division of the company.
Former employees of R3, the names of which Fortune does not, said that internal financial target of the company is ten times less than previously announced, and the figure of $200 million, in their words, “absurd” and untrue.
Commenting on this information, the General Director of R3 Charlie Cooper said the Fortune that the consortium is not facing a shortage of funds, and promised that at the end of the calendar year R3 will publish a report on the financial status. In particular, Cooper said:
Currently we have more than adequate funding, and we are not planning to raise additional funds.
At the end of may payment service Forex CLS in R3 has invested $5 million in its third round of fundraising.
An unnamed former employee of R3, told Fortune that one of the problems faced by the consortium was the lack of developers for the blockchain called Corda:
Although R3 officially claims that the project of creating a Corda involved 1300 developers, if you look at public releases, you will see no more than three names. In creating the public version of Ethereum was attended by 10 000 developers.
Among the founders and participants of the R3 was listed banks giants JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, but Goldman Sachs (and Bank of Santander) left the consortium in 2016. An unnamed source at Goldman Sachs told Fortune that the Bank took such a decision because of too large scale consortium.
R3 recently signed a partnership agreement with startup Bloxian Technology. This was a departure from the business model of the partnership exclusively with the banks. The fact that the R3 has addressed to companies engaged in sales in the blockchain means that the consortium began to compete with Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, which includes JPMorgan and Microsoft, as well as with Hyperledger.
Last year R3 sued for Ripple (XRP), arguing that the latter broke an agreement to sell to a consortium of 5 billion tokens XRP $0,0085 until the end of 2019. Ripple claims that it is not bound by its obligations, referring to the alleged failure of R3 to perform certain clauses of the agreement. The case will be heard in new York. Now the cost of 5 billion XRP reached $3.3 billion — in case of victory in the court of R3 will be able to obtain much-needed funds now.
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