Chain and nine financial institutions jointly release blockchain open standards

Capital One, Citigroup, Fidelity, First Data, Fiserv, MUFG, Nasdaq, State Street, and Visa have made important contributions to creating innovative protocols for mass adoption.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chain, Inc., a leading blockchain technology provider, today announced the public release of Chain Open Standard 1 (Chain OS 1), an open source blockchain protocol developed over the past 18 months through a unique collaboration between Silicon Valley companies and global financial services organizations.

Chain Open Standards is already supporting multiple blockchain projects at leading financial firms, which have been able to drive demand for open standards through a deep collaboration with Chain that began as early as 2014. Today, the standard is being opened to the wider financial community for the first time.

“Visa and Chain have been collaborating to explore how blockchain architecture can work at Visa to benefit our customers,” said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa. “The Chain open standard is the culmination of many months of iteration and problem solving, and we are pleased to continue to play an important role in this development.”

"Nasdaq is pleased to participate in the development of Chain open standards across a variety of use cases, including private market securities, proxy voting and settlement," said Brad Peterson, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Nasdaq. "We are particularly excited to collaborate with our market technology clients on these developments and look forward to continued innovation in this space."

“We have worked hard to advance blockchain adoption internally, and now as the broader financial industry continues to embrace blockchain, Chain’s protocol can support some of the most complex use cases we are watching,” said Hu Liang, Senior Managing Director of State Street Bank’s Center for Emerging Technologies. “We now look forward to continuing this collaboration with Chain and the financial community around Chain’s open standards.”

"Chain is a dynamic partner across both our investment and innovation portfolios, enabling Citi to explore blockchain applications in currency, payments and beyond for our clients," said Debby Hopkins, Citi Chief Innovation Officer and CEO of Citi Ventures. "Chain's open standards will greatly advance the development of new blockchain applications and significantly scale their future scale in the evolving financial ecosystem."

The Chain open standard is purpose-built to support large-scale financial applications, running on a permissioned blockchain network while meeting the strict regulatory, security and privacy requirements of the financial services industry.

Chain open standards achieve breakthroughs in the following aspects:

1. The new consensus model completes transactions in less than a second, even with very large transaction volumes.

2. Private solutions encrypt blockchain data and allow selective reading by relevant counterparties and regulators

3. Smart contract framework and virtual machine support simple rule execution and Turing complete program for key-value storage

4. Scalable data model reduces operational overhead for network participants

5. Rich metadata layer to support KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) requirements

Introduction to Chain open standards website: https://chain.com/os

"Chain's approach to development puts the needs of our partners at the center of iterative updates and collaborative development efforts," said Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain. "By working with market leaders on real projects across a range of use cases in banking, payments, capital markets, and insurance, we have designed a set of blockchain standards from the ground up to solve problems in a cohesive way. We are excited to make the results of this multi-year effort available to the broader financial community today."

Chain will also collaborate with other open source blockchain, cryptography and distributed systems projects to ensure interoperability and coordination through industry-wide efforts.

Blockchain is a new type of database that can span multiple organizations. A blockchain-based network enables participating institutions to issue, trade and store financial assets securely through digital media, which can reduce costs for new network operators and participants and create new product opportunities.

Chain gave a live demonstration of open standards at the Consensus 2016 Conference in New York.