Capital One, Citigroup, Fidelity, First Data, Fiserv, MUFG, Nasdaq, State Street and Visa contribute to innovative protocol for high-scale applications

SAN FRANCISCO, May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chain, Inc., a leading provider of blockchain technology, today announced the public release of Chain Open Standard 1 (Chain OS 1), an open source blockchain protocol developed over the last 18 months through a unique collaboration between the Silicon Valley company and global financial services firms.

The Chain Open Standard is already powering several blockchain projects at leading financial companies, which drove the requirements for the standard through deep partnerships with Chain that began as far back as 2014. The standard is being opened up to the wider financial community for the first time today.

"Visa and Chain have been collaborating to explore how a blockchain architecture can operate at Visa's scale to the benefit of our clients," said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president, Innovation & Strategic Partnerships at Visa. "The Chain Open Standard is the culmination of many months of iteration and problem solving, and we are pleased to be playing an ongoing role in that process."

"Nasdaq has been pleased to participate in the development of the Chain Open Standard through a variety of use cases, including private market securities, proxy voting and clearing," said Brad Peterson, Executive Vice President and CIO at Nasdaq. "In particular, we are excited to be collaborating with our market technology clients on these developments and look forward to our continued innovation in this area."

"As our effort on advancing blockchain adoption internally and with the broader financial industry continues, Chain's protocol supports some of the most complex use cases we have in mind," said Hu Liang, Senior Managing Director, Emerging Technologies Center at State Street. "We are looking forward to continuing this collaboration with Chain and the community around this Open Standard."

"Chain is a dynamic collaborative partner in both our investment and innovation portfolios, enabling Citi to explore blockchain applications for our customers in currencies, payments and beyond," said Debby Hopkins, Chief Innovation Officer of Citi and CEO of Citi Ventures. "The Chain Open Standard will greatly advance the progress and future scale of new blockchain use cases in an evolving financial ecosystem."

The Chain Open Standard was purpose-built to enable high-scale financial applications to run on permissioned blockchain networks while meeting the stringent regulatory, security and privacy requirements of the financial services industry.

The Chain Open Standard is pioneering:

• A novel consensus model that achieves transaction finality in less than a second, even at high transaction volumes
• A privacy solution that encrypts blockchain data and provides selective read access to relevant counterparties and regulators
• A smart contract framework and virtual machine that supports simple rule enforcement as well as Turing complete programs with key-value storage
• A scalable data model that reduces operational load for network participants
• A rich metadata layer to meet KYC and AML requirements

https://chain.com/os

"Chain's approach puts our partners' requirements at the center of an iterative and collaborative R&D effort," said Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain. "By partnering deeply on real projects with market leaders across a range of use cases in banking, payments, capital markets and insurance, we have designed a blockchain standard from the ground-up to solve problems in a cohesive way. We are delighted to be opening this multi-year effort to the broader financial community today."

Chain will also collaborate with other open source blockchain, cryptography and distributed systems projects to ensure interoperability and harmonization across industry efforts.

A blockchain is a new class of database that can span multiple organizations. A blockchain-based network enables participating institutions to securely issue, transact and store financial assets in a digital medium, which reduces costs and enables new product opportunities for network operators and participants.

Attendees of the Consensus 2016 Conference in New York will be able to view live demonstrations of the Chain Open Standard.

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About Chain

Chain, Inc. (www.chain.com) is a technology company that partners with leading financial firms to build and deploy blockchain networks that transform markets. Chain develops and maintains the Chain Open Standard, an open source blockchain protocol for high-scale financial applications. Chain's platform includes Chain Core, an enterprise-grade production node, and the Chain Sandbox prototyping environment.

Chain has raised $45M from leading venture capital firms and strategic investors. The company's board of directors includes the former CEO of American Express as well as one of the founding executives of PayPal.

Chain is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

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SOURCE Chain, Inc.

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