Chain, a Silicon Valley startup focused on blockchain technology, has announced the release of Open Standards One (OS 1), an open source blockchain protocol.
It has been developed over the past 18 months in collaboration with a number of financial institutions including Visa, Nasdaq, Citi, Fidelity, and Capital One.
The VC backed startup, which raised $45 million, aims to transform already existing assets, such as loans or dollars, into non-double-spendable and easily transferable blockchain records, digitizing assets and turning them into digital bearer instruments.
The technology was showcased in secret last month at Chain Partner Summit held at Nasdaq’s Times Square offices where 100 executives witnessed the transformation of dollars into digital cash. It has now been released to the public as open source to ensure interoperability. Collaboration with global financial institutions
OS1 has been built in close collaboration with global financial institutions with the release being the culmination of many months of “iteration and problem solving” according to Jim McCarthy, executive vice president, Innovation & Strategic Partnerships at Visa. “Many of [the financial institutions] are very far down the pathway of bringing this to market,” says Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain who further expanded at Consensus 2016 to state: “It’s a secure blockchain protocol specifically for high scale financial markets. It’s not meant to be for everyone, it’s not meant to solve every problem. It’s meant to solve the problem of powering high scale financial markets and moving assets digitally over them.” OS1 uses a Simplified Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT) consensus system among identified and permissioned validators (nodes) with a capacity for tens of thousands of transactions per second. Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain Zero-knowledge proofs
It ensures privacy by the use of zero-knowledge proofs that conceal amounts transacted from everyone else but the transacting parties while allowing the entire network […]
