Hello Corda community,

At CordaCon a change to the leadership of the project was announced:

• The new maintainer of the open source project is Rick Parker.
• The new head of engineering at R3 is Dave Hudson.

Me and Richard will still be around contributing essay-length emails and occasional PRs, so this is not expected to be a disruptive change. Richard continues as CTO with more time is being freed up for long range thinking and analysis, something too many companies struggle to prioritise. I'm moving on to a new project at R3 described briefly below.

Rick Parker is one of the earliest to join the Corda team, back before it even was called Corda - his first commit was in May 2016. He's worked on many aspects of the project and is one of our most senior engineers. He's recently done a great job of leading the performance team (his tech talk on that is here) and currently has oversight of all work on the core platform. You can contact him directly at rick.parker@... or on Slack as user parkri. Amongst his priorities for maintainership is putting in place better procedures for ensuring bugs and PRs are triaged quickly - unfortunately, as we've grown responsibility for the day to day duties of running the open source project have sometimes shifted around between people and things slip between the cracks. Sorry about that! 

Dave Hudson was giving tech talks on statistical analysis of Bitcoin way back in 2014 (read more on his website hashingit.com) so he's something of a blockchain old hand. Dave has been with R3 since 2017 and isn't new to many of you: he was previously running R3's professional services arm, and now has responsibility for all of delivery and development of both Corda and Corda Enterprise. 

I'll be splitting my time between Corda and a new project we announced last week at CordaCon: Conclave.

Conclave is a generalisation of the JVM in SGX work we've been doing over the past couple of years. Our focus until now has been on running deterministic Corda smart contracts inside enclaves, to provide a major privacy upgrade. We're keeping up the same level of focus on that work whilst simultaneously setting up a new team to bring arbitrary multi-party computations to developers.

I'll be writing more about Conclave and MPC in future. If you already know how you'd like to use MPC in your apps please enter your details here and we'll contact you when ready:

https://www.r3.com/conclave-beta/

We're currently revamping the API and exploring attack scenarios that affect how an MPC API needs to be designed. Once that work is done we'll start a multi-iteration beta programme, like we did with the pre-1.0 Corda milestones.