Hybrid distributed ledger blockchain company Kadena LLC today announced the launch of a free blockchain-as-a-service enterprise solution on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud marketplace.

The new service, Kadena Scalable Permissioned Blockchain, builds on the company’s free community edition released for Amazon Web Services in January.

With this release, Kadena seeks to build its portfolio in the blockchain market which will reach $60 billion by 2024, according to Wintergreen Research. Using the blockchain-as-a-service model, the company hopes to reach more developers and enterprise interests because it permits organizations to set up blockchain services rapidly and significantly reduce the costs of setup and time-to-market from on-premises solutions.

“In building with Microsoft, Kadena is committed to providing an accessible onramp to blockchain for businesses of all sizes,” said Will Martino, founder and chief executive of Kadena. “We are bringing our secure and scalable technology to Azure customers as we continue working with Microsoft Azure Marketplace to develop cloud-enabled blockchain solutions.”

A standout capability of Kadena’s blockchain is that it provides what the company calls “formal verification” for smart contracts. Smart contracts are programmable agreements between parties that execute transactions only when certain conditions are met, including automated agreement or all-party agreement before completion.

Formal verification allows the rapid prototyping of real world agreement conditions into a smart contract in a way that can be expected to execute with mathematically provable certainty. The specification language used by Kadena is called Pact and can formally verify that code does not contain potentially catastrophic bugs.

As a result, Kadena believes that its blockchain system would be good for mission-critical systems and enterprise businesses that could include even those in highly regulated industries such as finance, insurance and pharmaceutical.

“Pact’s formal verification of user code allows you to harness the same mathematical methods used by aerospace and nuclear power engineers to catch potential exploits before deployment,” said Stuart Popejoy, Kaden’sa founder and president. “With Kadena’s blockchain, you don’t need a degree in formal mathematics to have mission-critical security protecting your business applications.”

The new edition of Kadena’s blockchain includes brand new features for Microsoft Azure users, including native support for cross-blockchain transactions. That will prevent blockchain lock-in for users, allowing them to interoperate between public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The system also includes formally verified interfaces, enabling users to create mathematically secure proofs in a manner similar to constructs from other programming languages such as Java, Rust and Scala. That reduces the chances that attacks can occur against smart contracts by mitigating exploits, critical bugs and hacks.

The Kadena Scalable Blockchain is free to use and supports up to four nodes that can provide up to 2,000 transactions per second.

The released version will also support secure channels, trustless escrows, pluggable encryption, contract governance and automatic bug detection via formal verification. A paid version will be launched at the same time to give enterprise users access to the full power of the technology, which scales up to over 500 nodes and can execute more than 8,000 transactions per second.

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