Enterprise blockchain startup Chain Inc. announced Monday the launch of a cloud-managed distributed ledger service called Sequence for business and financial applications.

Sequence provides blockchain technology, a distributed cryptographic ledger that secures transactions privately in an auditable format, as a platform that businesses can access as a service without needing to host the infrastructure themselves.

According to Chain’s announcement, Sequence is a ledger technology service designed to manage balances for finance and commerce applications such as wallet apps, lending platforms, marketplaces, exchanges and more.

Blockchain technology allows for the transaction of assets, often called tokens, and securely stores balances for different accounts. As a result, this sort of ledger technology is useful for fair and tamper-proof accounting. A marketplace app could use a blockchain to track the amount of money each user has in the system and moderate the exchange of that money for products sold, or a pay-per-view video service could track user credits and provide micropayments.

“Sequence lets modern software teams focus on shipping and scaling their product instead of building and maintaining ledger infrastructure,” the Chain team wrote in the blog post announcing the launch. “It does this by combining the convenience of SaaS with the security of cryptographic transaction signing.”

Prior to today’s launch, Sequence was kept in a private preview. Developer teams with access to that preview have already built a number of potential apps atop the system.

Some examples include a ride sharing app for storing driver credits and rider balances, a mobile payments app recording funds due to merchants, a cryptocurrency exchange, a lender app for tracking loans and an internet voice calling app storing prepaid minutes.

While Chain describes Sequence as a cryptographically secured cloud service, which means that the blockchain will be hosted privately by the company. However, operators using the blockchain will maintain control of their own cryptographic keys. That means that although the data flows through Chain’s cloud-based hosting, Chain can’t see or tamper with the data passing through the service itself. Only operators with the cryptographic keys to unlock the data on the blockchain can add new transactions to the blockchain or read old transactions already on the blockchain.

Chain’s offering is currently aimed at developers and mimics offerings seen across the rest of the industry, which operate in a similar manner. In this fashion, it is a general-use blockchain platform designed to be easily embedded in apps with a focus on acting as a record of balance for accounting purposes. IBM Corp.’s Blockchain service, based on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, and Oracle Corp.’s recently announced Blockchain Cloud Service offer comparable products, but they target infrastructure more than applications.

Chain has a solid history of blockchain platform development. In 2015, the company made history by processing the first-ever Nasdaq stock market exchange transaction powered by Linq, which used Chain’s enterprise-level blockchain platform. Later, Chain announced that it would open-source the code that underlies its blockchain infrastructure.

Since the company’s launch in 2014, Chain has raised more than $43 million in venture capital from investors, including Khosla Ventures, Visa, Nasdaq, Citi Ventures and Capital One.

A public developer preview is available today for free. The developer preview gives access to a software development kit, which will allow registered developers to embed access to Sequence into apps.

The company’s blog noted that a production service of Sequence will become available for Intel SGX platforms during the first quarter of 2018. That’s also when Sequence will go become generally available and production pricing will be announced then.

Image: Chain