Permissioned Blockchains: An Interview with Takao Asayama

A couple of weeks ago, Bitcoin.com broke a story about Mijin and its unique Ninja advertising at the Breakthrough Summit 2015 in Japan. Tech Bureau’s CEO Takao Asayama has officially announced its low-cost project for creating permissioned blockchains. The startup wants to engage other finance institutions with their own individual blockchains seeking to reduce infrastructure cost to 1,000% by 2018. The company plans on doing private testing in 2016 to “stress test” the network conditions.

Also read: Disrupting Finance: FinTech and Bitcoin Booming in Asia

“The goal of Mijin is to create a platform for easily deploying a blockchain and using it in a production environment. We want to provide a really solid system that can be useful to solve many real-world problems, securely and at low cost.”

Bitcoin.com chatted with Takao Asayama about his plans for Mijin and his ideas for permissioned blockchains. He gives us an in-depth look into how this distributed ledger technology will reshape finance across the board. The databases of yesterday are history when this protocol gets implemented for today’s applications, and it will most definitely provide more efficient solutions for tomorrow.

Bitcoin.com (BC): Can you explain what Mijin is?

Takao Asayama (TA): Mijin is a platform that let anyone build permissioned blockchains with 100% uptime. It is a tool to enable companies to reduce costs and increase security for some types of data. It will also let companies execute complex smart contracts and transact with other companies.

BC: Why do you feel this could reduce infrastructure costs?

TA: Mijin will reduce infrastructure costs because special computing hardware will not be needed to enable high throughput and high reliability. More importantly, server administration and development costs will be significantly reduced because Mijin provides a simple infrastructure to enable complex data handling tasks. This will give companies that use Mijin significant cost and competitive advantages over those who don’t.

BC: What is a “permissioned blockchain” in your opinion?

TA: A permissioned blockchain is a blockchain that allows only permissioned entities to control nodes or request transactions.

Our permissioned blockchain also allows, read, write, and execution (for smart contracts) access, similarly to how UNIX file system permissions work.

BC: Can your idea coexist with Bitcoin’s blockchain?

TA: Yes, Mijin uses a simple JSON API to communicate with outside programs. Bitcoin could also be used on Mijin chains by burning or escrowing the Bitcoins and created mosaics (digital assets) to represent the backed coins.

We are planning to connect multiple mijin networks and also other blockchains such as Bitcoin, Nem, or Ethereum. Multichain communication will be enabled via the NEM blockchain in 2016.

“Any kind of business that needs to track ownership of money or assets can take advantage of Mijin”

BC: What will you be looking for when doing your private testing in 2016?

TA: We need to stress test to see what the maximum transaction throughput is for different network conditions. We also need to work with our partners to validate that our technology meets all their needs. We are already discussing with banks for experimental tests, and also implementing mijin to some live system of our clients, but we need more intense testing in public.

BC: Can you explain how Mijin Smart Contracts will be deployed?

TA: This is an area of active research, but we are considering supporting rule-based smart contracts that are Turing complete. Rule-based programming seems like it will be easier for users to implement their business rules and easier for us to implement securely.

BC: What kind of businesses do you see using Mijin?

TA: Any kind of business that needs to track ownership of money or assets can take advantage of Mijin. Not only banks or security companies, online games will also be good customers of ours. Also, businesses that need to track changes to data over time in a mathematically provable way.

BC: What’s the overall goal here with Mijin’s future?

TA: The goal of Mijin is to create a platform for easily deploying a blockchain and using it in a production environment. We want to provide a really solid system that can be useful to solve many real-world problems, securely and at low cost.

Our mission is to reduce the cost of the banking system by up to 1,000%, by the end of 2018. You’ll get to know “the Power of the Blockchain” by then for sure 🙂

Bitcoin.com wants to thank Takao Asayama for speaking with us about this project. We will be sure to inform our readers about the startups upcoming developments. Stay tuned as blockchain technology disrupts the finance system of the past!

Do you think permissioned blockchains have good incentives? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Redmemes, and the Mijin website