Chinese open source blockchain startup Antshares has raised more than $4.5 million in a crowdsourced fundraising.

Founded in 2015, Antshares is building a decentralized and distributed network protocol based on blockchain technology that will allow users to digitalize assets or shares, and accomplish financial transactions through a peer-to-peer network including registration and issuance and actual transactions along with settlement and payments.

Based in Shanghai, China, the company offers the Onchain platform that aims to service goods and assets ranging from real estate titles to corporate equity, supply chain assets to creditors’ claims.

“Our vision is to make Onchain a truly universal Blockchain framework,” Antshares founder and Chief Executive Officer Da Hongfei said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE. “Utilizing different plug-in modules, our framework could be applied for a public chain, a consortium chain or even a private chain. Our cross-chain adaptor module, currently under development, creates interoperability among these different chains.”

Antshares claims to incorporate a number of firsts, including being the first open-source blockchain project developed in China; first significant Chinese initial crowd offering; and the first organic Chinese blockchain project to work with both Microsoft Azure and the Hyperledger Project.

The company is preparing to ready its wallets for global release by the end of October, and is also developing a mobile wallet for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Winning

Not only is Antshares interesting because it managed to raise $4.5 million through crowdsourcing, the company itself is also attempting to build a platform which venture capital-backed startups with their own proprietary versions of the blockchain are also attempting to do: build a blockchain-based financial transaction platform.

Antshares takes the open source part of their platform seriously, offering the code as they build it under an MIT license, a permissive license that only puts very limited restrictions, with the working code hosted on GitHub for anyone to download.

“If you are interested, you can download, copy, modify or fork it,” the company notes on its about page. A copy of the code is available from their Github page here.

Image credit: Antshares