Blockchain software and infrastructure company BitFury Group Monday announced the launch of its enterprise distributed cryptographic ledger technology service.

The blockchain framework, named Exonum, is aimed at providing businesses and governments a secure and easy way to rapidly bring blockchain solutions online.

“We have seen interest and enthusiasm for blockchain solutions grow every day as businesses, governments and institutions look for the easiest and most secure way to take their next step. Exonum is the next step to blockchain, offering robust and unparalleled blockchain capabilities for asset management and security,” said Valery Vavilov, chief executive of Bitfury Group. “We have spent almost two years working to create our Exonum blockchain platform, deeply analyzing and modeling different blockchain concepts.”

The name of Exonum comes from the world “exonumia,” which means tokens or other objects used to for exchange in a community or marketplace. In the past, cultures have used tokens, badges, coins and even paper to represent value. With the advent of computers, exonumia came to include virtual gold in video games such as World of Warcraft. Now, blockchain cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have made actual digital currencies a possibility.

With this blockchain, Bitfury hopes to add another way for businesses and governments to exchange value and securities safely as digital assets – that is, a way to securely digitize their own public and private exonumia.

The first and most prominent feature of the Exonum blockchain is that it is openly available to third parties and its underlying code and application programming interfaces are open source. Developers can access not only the entire codebase for the platform but also the client software used to manage the blockchain as well.

“Respecting the open and collaborative nature of the blockchain and Bitcoin communities, we elected to make this software available to anyone developing blockchain-based applications,” said Vavilov.

The Exonum blockchain can be audited and controlled via a lightweight JavaScript client that allows the user to connect nodes, request data, send transactions and verify cryptographic proofs on nearly any device.

As for security, BitFury has anchored Exonum to the largest and most robust blockchain in the world: the Bitcoin blockchain. Every time a block is added to the Exonum blockchain, its status is taken as a “snapshot” and stored in the Bitcoin blockchain as a way to allow an independent audit of its security. Blockchains already provide internal security by providing a mechanism to make previous transactions indelible and difficult to modify, but private, permissioned blockchains can be subverted if all of their nodes are captured and changed. By anchoring to a larger, active and well-trod blockchain, the security of that chain bolsters the security of the private chain.

Exonum boasts a Byzantine consensus algorithm between nodes, common to private permissioned blockchains, that prevents data from being added until enough nodes agree to its authenticity. The algorithm allows Bitfury’s blockchain to handle up to 3,000 transactions per second with a clearing latency of 2.5 seconds – and the capability to bear up to 15,000 transactions per second in custom cases.

By comparison, the Bitcoin blockchain currently manages seven transactions per second and the next largest blockchain, Ethereum, supports roughly 15 transactions per second.

For developers, Exonum is based on the Rust programming language, which is considered a highly secure and safe language. Rust focuses on memory management and fault-tolerance to protect against common errors and exploits.

Now that Exonum has been announced, Bitfury intends to exhibit its platform. After an initial exhibition at the RustFest 2017 conference, an international roadshow will travel to Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Washington, Moscow, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Astana, Beijing, Kiev and other cities.

Bitfury’s Exonum blockchain enters an ever-growing industry of blockchain platforms aimed at businesses and governments. Existing solutions include PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Vulcan Digital Asset Services, Nasdaq’s Open Assets Protocol and the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project, which powers IBM’s blockchain framework solution.

Exonum’s focus on security and open-source freedom of interoperability is what Bitfury hopes will give its platform a competitive edge in this still developing market for blockchain frameworks. Further details on Exonum are available on the platform’s own website and its source code is available for free on the GitHub code repository.

Image: Bitfury