The financial industry’s efforts to develop a blockchain implementation suitable for the business world is about to cross a major milestone.

R3CEV LLC, the company leading one of the two consortia involved in the push, today said it plans to release its core Codra technology under an open-source license on Nov. 30. Reuters reports that the firm won’t simply move the code into the public domain but will instead contribute it to the Hyperledger Project, the financial industry’s other major initiative to develop a secure blockchain standard.

That project was launched last year with fewer than two dozen corporate backers and has since seen its membership balloon to more than 70 organizations, including R3 itself. The latter firm supplied the core architecture of the platform with the stated goal to “benefit all market participants.”

Codra and Hyperledger share the same basic value proposition: streamlining complicated transactions such as stock purchases that currently take upwards of days to process. Their bitcoin-inspired “disaggregated” design makes it possible to automatically sync the details of a deal between the related parties without using a slow, centralized control mechanism as traditional banking services do. Moreover, the frameworks provide ways to handle the legal contracts that often accompany such exchanges.

This overlap was no doubt one of the key factors behind R3’s decision to merge the Codra code base into Hyperledger. The recent call from HSBC Holdings plc to unify the projects probably played a part, too. Vivek Ramachandran, the head of product for the British banking giant, told IBTimes in August that unifying the financial sector’s blockchain efforts under a single banner is not only beneficial but outright necessary to achieve all the desired objectives. R3 chief engineer James Carlyle echoed these sentiments to Reuters following today’s news.

Carlyle pointed to the need for interoperability as the primary reason his firm decided to put its weight behind Hyperledger. Establishing a common blockchain standard, he explained, will avoid a situation where different organizations can’t do business with one another because they employ separate implementations of the technology. And concentrating the financial industry’s entire efforts on a single system will also allow development to progress faster.

But while they’re the main drivers behind the push to develop a production-ready blockchain standards, banks are hardly the only segment are set to benefit from the technology. IBM Corp., for instance, recently introduced a cloud-based version of Hyberledger that it sees finding use in sectors as diverse as healthcare and government. Even delivery companies could theoretically employ the platform to automatically update their truck manifests after dropping off a package to a customer.

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