

Tech Bureau, the parent company of the Japanese Bitcoin exchange Zaif, has announced a low-cost solution for creating permissioned blockchains with assistance from developers from the NEM blockchain project.

The goal of the solution, dubbed Mijin, is to permit financial institutions to reduce infrastructure costs by up to 1000% by 2018, according to the Japanese company.

Tech Bureau believes that these blockchains can replace traditional databases, creating point systems, payment services, online games, airline mile programs, logistics, insurance, financial systems, and governance systems.

CEO Takao Asayama commented:

If a Mijin blockchain is used, security can increase and at the same time the need for redundant, durable, and explicitly backed-up systems, will be removed. Our mission is to allow financial institutions to reduce infrastructure costs to 10% of the current costs by the end of 2018.

Masakazu Masujima, Tech Bureau’s legal adviser from Mori Hamada & Matsumoto, added:

A key difference compared to Bitcoin is that Mijin will allow private blockchains. This is profoundly interesting because of the potential to completely change financial, logistics, and governance systems.

The solution will provide an initial capacity of up to 25 tx/sec by the end of 2015 with geographically distributed nodes, with the goal to improve throughput up to 100 tx/sec by the end of 2016.

Within a private network, Mijin will supposedly offer a robust capacity of up to several thousand tx/sec, achieving performance comparable to credit card processors while keeping infrastructure costs low.

Chief Blockchain Officer at Tech Bureau and core developer of Bitcoin 2.0 project, NEM, Makoto Takemiya, noted:

NEM has been in development from scratch for 18 months and the NEM team has the expertise and experience to make Mijin the best private blockchain system in the world.

In 2016, the Mijin project will begin a private beta testing phase with partner companies, with the goal of releasing an open source version of the project in the Spring. Tech Bureau also plans to execute smart contracts across the Mijin blockchains by communicating via the main NEM chain.

Java programming language-based NEM, short for New Economy Movement, is a blockchain technology platform that uses a Proof-of-Importance algorithm for blockchain consensus. The PoI consensus mechanism calculates an importance score for an account by taking into consideration its balance, activity of the account, as well as the importance of accounts transacted with. NEM also incorporates the Eigentrust++ reputation algorithm, multi-signature capabilities, encrypted messaging, and a robust client-server web architecture with system layers’ encapsulation.

The NEM latform recently added editable M-of-N multisignature technology, a first for a cryptocurrency.