Thomson Reuters to Power Blockchain Contracts with Experimental Service

Media giant Thomson Reuters is opening up its data to smart contract authors building on private versions of the ethereum blockchain and R3's Corda distributed ledger platform.

Released in beta today, a 'smart oracle' called BlockOne IQ (B1IQ) is designed to power smart contracts with the kind of reliable financial information required to let counterparties transact without a middleman. B1IQ allows blockchain participants to leverage the media giant's reputation for providing accurate data about share prices, exchange rates, financial benchmarks and more.

The firm devised what initial data should be offered to blockchain developers based on requests from existing customers. The data being made available is useful for actions including the payment of dividends, stock splits "and anything where the company’s equity is impacted by some sort of action," according to Sam Chadwick, director of Thomson Reuters financial and risk management division.

Currently, the oracle is only experimental.

While Thomson Reuters is targeting the larger members of R3 and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the oracle can only be used as part of any organization's proofs-of-concept, just not in live applications. By the end the year, Thomson Reuters intends to decide whether to monetize the oracle, or scrap the project altogether, according to Chadwick.
More sophisticated contracts

Centralized applications, such as those run by banks and brokers, have had access to the the firm's data via more traditional APIs and FTPs for some time. But, this launch opens up access to the growing decentralized application market for the data needed to facilitate more sophisticated transactions.

With additional data sets forthcoming, Chadwick believes the oracle could eventually enable an endless array of advanced blockchain transactions without the need of middlemen.

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