Austin-based enterprise blockchain company Second State LLC announced today that it has raised $3 million in an early-stage funding round.

Second State provides a tool that allows developers to rapidly create blockchain distributed ledger applications that take advantage of the decentralized nature of the technology.

To do that, Second State gives developers a web-based integrated development editor that assists in the creation of the elements of decentralized applications, known as DApps, including smart contracts, formal rules, web 3.0 scripting, ElasticSearch scripts, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

“We’re providing high-quality, turn-key blockchain and smart contract solutions for businesses,” said Michael Yuan, founder and chief executive of Second State.

The company describes itself as providing “middleware for smart contracts,” as a way to open up opportunities to build DApps and other blockchain applications for businesses developers.

Smart contracts are a self-executing proposition between multiple parties that uses the blockchain to hold a currency or virtual asset in escrow until particular conditions are met. Those conditions are programmable and use cryptographic key exchange to make the exchange of assets permanent and auditable on the blockchain.

Smart contracts are an important part of DApp development, so contracts allow two or more parties to write their own transaction without the need for a central authority to verify the execution. A contract only executes when all parties agree – submitting cryptographic keys to unlock it – and the rules of the contract are satisfied.

“Not only are Second State blockchains programmable by its enterprise customers, optimized for business use cases, and completely open source,” Yuan said. “They are supported by commercial service agreements as well.”

The Second State blockchain is also enterprise-ready and is fully compatible with the public Ethereum blockchain. It uses its own baked-in virtual machine and programming language extensions designed specifically for business needs.

Notable enterprise features include a formal rules engine and rules language for smart contracts, an integrated smart contract search engine, a high-performance and fast finality for transactions using the underlying blockchain, and one-second confirmation time.

The platform also provides a comprehensive toolset of DevOps and container tools, meaning it can be quickly adopted within highly digitized environments using modern development tools. The expectation is that Second State can empower customers to create new blockchain apps simply and easily.

Second State has also been a major contributor to the open-source community and the company aims to make further contributions to the new WebAssembly-based Ethereum 2.0 virtual machine.

The Series A round was led by Susquehanna International Group.

Image: Second State