Contour

Contour was a trade finance network incubated by R3 with a group of banks. It spun out of the Voltron pilot in 2020 to move letters of credit onto a distributed ledger. Its users were multinational banks and import-export firms. The pain point: a single letter of credit travels as paper between issuing, advising and beneficiary banks, and repeated checks create five to ten day cycles plus disputes over discrepancies.

Technically the network ran on Corda's permissioned chain, with each participant holding a verifiable copy of documents instead of forwarding them down a chain; live tests at HSBC and DBS cut presentation time by roughly ninety percent. The network ceased operations in late 2023 when shareholders withdrew support, at a throughput of about 60 to 70 transactions a month. On 22 October 2025 XDC Network's venture arm acquired it to rebuild letter-of-credit digitisation with stablecoin settlement.