Can you create a private blockchain in 90 seconds? The team at Coin Sciences Ltd think it is possible with MultiChain, their fork of Bitcoin.

The founders of the UK-based startup, Gideon Greenspan, Michael Rozantsev, and Simon Liu, have impressive credentials. CEO Gideon started coding as a child and has a PhD in computer science from Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology. Rozantsev is CTO and has a PhD in computer science from the Weizmann Institute. Liu has a BA in computer science from Cambridge University and supposedly posted this demo of MutliChain on Vimeo, titled “Create a private blockchain in 90 seconds.”

MultiChain is an ready-to-use platform for launching private blockchains that overcome bitcoin characteristics that are obstacles to institutional financial sector, namely issues of privacy and control.

Based on Coin Sciences’ white paper, MultiChain solves problems of mining, privacy and openness through integrated management of user permissions. The platform ensures that a blockchain’s activity is only visible to chosen participants, introduces controls over which transactions are permitted, and enables mining to take place securely without proof of work and its associated costs.

To solve private blockchain issues with mining, Multichain presents an innovative method for network entities to trust decision making. The platform restricts mining activity to a set of identifiable entities and avoids monopolization of the mining process by one participant. This solution, called “mining diversity”, accomplishes this by constraining the number of blocks that may be created by the same miner within a given window. Mining diversity removes the importance of proof-of-work and the need for native cryptocurrency, and enables miners processing transactions to approve transactions in a random rotation.

MultiChain is backwards compatible with Bitcoin, thus users can port existing Bitcoin applications to MultiChain but, instead of supporting a single blockchain like the Bitcoin Core, MultiChain can be configured to support different blockchains on the same network simultaneously.

MultiChain can also support multiple third party assets, and can enable transitions between private blockchains and the bitcoin blockchain. Coin Sciences road map for MultiChain includes such features as blockchain messaging, decentralized exchanges, and synchronization with databases like Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Coin Sciences also developed CoinSpark – a protocol for adding messages to bitcoin transactions, and Coin Secrets – a window of metadata in the bitcoin blockchain.

Interestingly, Greenspan blogged last week that enterprises planning to implement a blockchain project need to understand why they are using a blockchain.

There are a bunch of conditions that need to be fulfilled. And if they’re not, you should go back to the drawing board. Maybe you can define the project better. Or maybe you can save everyone a load of time and money, because you don’t need a blockchain at all.

Those conditions include knowing that blockchains are technology for shared databases, multiple writers or participants, absence of trust, disintermediation, transaction interaction, rules restricting the transactions, known validators, and verifiably backed assets.

Greenspan notes that…