Stratumn raises $670,000 to provide developers with a blockchain application development platform

Stratumn is a Paris-based startup that intends to offer a platform-as-a-service project to developers interested in blockchain.

The company has just raised $670,000 (about €600,000) in seed funding from Otium Venture and corporate angels including Eric Larchevêque, CEO of bitcoin hardware wallet maker Ledger.

Developers can create, deploy and run applications on the platform developed by Stratumn, and these applications can also communicate with the Bitcoin blockchain, similar to Heroku (a cloud platform as a service that supports multiple programming languages). The difference is that the Stratumn platform is aimed at blockchain developers.

The Bitcoin blockchain is essentially a distributed database that records all Bitcoin transactions with a timestamp. Now more and more developers are beginning to take advantage of the blockchain to build applications that have nothing to do with Bitcoin transactions.

For example, Stampery is a blockchain startup that uses the Bitcoin blockchain to replace notaries. It can provide legally binding proof of all of a user’s sensitive documents, which are stored on the blockchain.

Stratumn aims to make it easier for developers to create applications on the blockchain. Stratumn said: There may be many blockchain startups like Stampery in the future. In order to save developers the unnecessary process of starting from scratch, Stratumn allows the applications you develop to "talk" directly to the blockchain, saving developers a lot of energy.

To achieve this, Stratumn has built an open source framework called "Chainscript". To not make it too technical or complicated, Chainscript files are JSON files that store some data. You can send this data to the blockchain through the Stratumn platform. After that, you can retrieve and audit these data packets according to the Chainscript format.

In other words, a company like Stampery can use Chainscript to build its platform on top of the Stratumn platform.

While the largest blockchain is still Bitcoin’s, institutions and companies are working on creating other types of blockchains. It’s still just the beginning for startups in this space, but if Stratumn can build an “agnostic” blockchain platform that can integrate and work with private blockchains or other types of alternative blockchains, then the Stratumn platform may become a great way for developers to build applications on top of decentralized databases, and in the future, it may lead to many interesting blockchain use cases.

Original article: http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/stratumn-is-building-a-sort-of-heroku-for-blockchain-applications/
By Romain Dillet
Translator: printemps
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/stratumn-670k)