San Francisco-based Chain, Inc., a blockchain developer company, announced the release of their Open Chain Standard 1 (Chain OS 1) blockchain protocol, which has been in development for the last 18 months.

Chain developed the new protocol with the assistance of several financial firms: Capital One, Citigroup, Fidelity, First Data, Fiserv, MUFG, Nasdaq, State Street and Visa.

While Chain OS 1 has been in development for last year and a half, the company said that the protocol is already being used by several large financial companies and that today’s announcement opens up the protocol to the “wider financial community”.

Jim McCarthy, executive vice president for Innovation & Strategic Partnerships at Visa, explained how Visa collaborated with Chain on improving blockchain technology, so it can scale to the same transaction loads as Visa’s payment network, “The Chain Open Standard is the culmination of many months of iteration and problem solving, and we are pleased to be playing an ongoing role in that process.”

According to the press release, Chain OS 1 was designed to confirm transactions in “less than a second” and a metadata section that is compatible with KYC/AML requirements that financial institutions are required to abide by. The Chain OS 1 protocol also includes smart contract framework and fully-encrypted data on the blockchain.

Adam Ludwig, CEO of Chain, said that his company’s partnership with financial industry leaders led to the creation of a blockchain standard that is compatible with the current financial environment:

“By partnering deeply on real projects with market leaders across a range of use cases in banking, payments, capital markets and insurance, we have designed a blockchain standard from the ground-up to solve problems in a cohesive way.”

The Open Chain Standard 1 will be showcased at the Consensus 2016 blockchain conference in New York.

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