Toronto-based Equibit Development Corporation (EDC) has completed the Supernode installation for its peer-to-peer OTC securities platform and said private beta testing will begin soon. The beta testing group will consist of financial institutions and other power users, of which a leading investor communications firm has already signed on, said a statement.

According to Chris Horlacher, CEO of EDC, the Supernode is the first cryptocurrency node that performs all cryptographic operations — private key generation, encryption, decryption and digital signatures — in hardware rather than software. It is certified FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 Level II-compliant under the Crypto Module Validation Program, it said.

"Supernodes are the foundation of our institutional product line, providing great speed and industry-leading security to firms wanting to use the Equibit network but not necessarily wanting to be concerned with maintaining the IT infrastructure and dealing with the compliance and security challenges that come along with that," said Horlacher.

The hosting partner for the Supernode is data centre giant Equinix, which operates over 145 facilities with over 14 million square feet of space around the globe.

The first Supernode has been placed in Equinix's TR2 data centre in downtown Toronto. It is a Tier 3+ facility with over 100,000 square feet of colocation space. Equinix's network and interconnection base helps decrease latency, improving performance and reliability of content delivery.

Equibit Development Corporation has also partnered with cloud solutions provider AirGate Technologies. AirGate will be assisting EDC in distributing the Equibit software through services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This will allow companies to deploy regular Equibit nodes in the cloud and secure the network by adding to its total computing power.

EDC also plans to launch a crowdsale of its equibit tokens in January, of which there will be a total supply of 21 million units available with a pre-sale opportunity on the first million. Each unit will be divisible to eight decimal places and will be required to create equity units on the network and for transaction fees, said the release.