Japanese business to business payments processor JCB Co., Ltd. announced Friday a partnership with Singapore-based Keychain, a distributed ledger blockchain technology provider, to build out a payment processing network.

JCB intends to use Keychain’s technology to increase security and suitability for payments made over its network. With blockchain technology, JCB’s payments system will gain increased operational integrity for its next-generation payments system.

The company launched its payment network and credit card issuance business in 1961 in Japan and began worldwide expansion in 1981. The acceptance network operated by JCB includes about 30 million merchants and its cards are issued in 24 countries and territories, with more than 130 million customers.

Keychain uses blockchain technology to build managed trust networks that can be used to secure and track transactions. A blockchain uses cryptography and mathematical proof of work to write transactions into a distributed ledger that can be audited by third parties without revealing sensitive information within individual transactions.

Due to its distributed and secure nature, blockchains provide trustless security by design for recorded transactions.

Using this technology, Keychain is developing a data security framework known as Keychain Core, it provides to partners infrastructure that allows the rapid development of apps that enable self-sovereign identity, secure workflows, smart contracts, and settlement of custom digital assets.

Keychain Core was launched in September, two years earlier than predicted by blockchain market analysts.

“Keychain gives our partners access to tooling that is fit-for-purpose in critical applications, two years ahead of what a recent blockchain report by Allied Business Intelligence suggested would be available on the market only in 2021,” said Jonathan Hope, chief executive of Keychain.

Using Keychain’s software development kit, the company seeks to provide its technology for industries including energy, finance, medical and pharmaceutical, automotive, regulatory compliance, insurance, supply chain management and gaming.

Exploration of blockchain payment networks has been underway for the past decade with recent application testing from Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. payment system B2B Connect. Earlier this month, Tokyo-based Softbank Group Corp. issued its first blockchain-enabled wallet cards as part of a payment processing network.

Earlier this month, JCB announced another partnership with blockchain-powered commercial payments platform Paystand Inc. That partnership is extremely similar to Friday’s announcement, showing JCB’s intent to continue combining the blockchain payments technology with its own.

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