Swedish blockchain startup ChromaWay has announced a new distributed database product called Postchain.
Revealed today at the Money2020 Europe in Copenhagen, ChromaWay positioned the new technology as one that would combine the benefits of an SQL database, while adding elements of blockchain technology.
While that may sound antithetical to its past blockchain work, ChromaWay CEO Henrik Hjelte instead framed the product as one that was perhaps more in line with the needs of enterprise companies.
“We can do the implementation directly in your database, but you get the same security properties as a federated blockchain. Postchain is one implementation of that idea,” Hjelte said.
A benefit, according to the CEO, is that Postchain works with established enterprise database systems like Oracle and Microsoft, or open-source databases like PostgreSQL, he said.
Hjelte told CoinDesk:
“Blockchain is often described as a database, but when you look at it, it’s not really suitable for storing and retrieving data in the same way a relational database is. Blockchain, the core idea is a linked list of transactions, but a database is designed to have certain properties for managing information over a long time.”
The idea for the Postchain product came from previous ChromaWay projects in which the team was attempting to speed up the transaction capacity of its designs in line with the demands of corporate users.
Already ChromaWay’s customers, including a media sector consortium, are currently trying out Postchain, Hjelte said. It will further serve as the back-end for smart contracts on the company’s project with the Swedish land registry, which records property transaction deals.
“You’ll have a secure replication of data between databases, so every node that is participating in a consortium will have the same copy of the database,” explained Hjelte.
The source code for the project will be released later this summer, according to the firm.
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