Russian blockchain firm Waves has announced updates to its enterprise platform, including accelerated smart contract execution, licensing fees and inter-chain anchoring.

On March 17, Waves wrote that the new Version 1.2 of Waves Enterprise will enable an increase in containerized smart contract execution speeds by up to 70 times.

The company has sped up execution times by replacing the platform’s former REST communication protocol with Google’s Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) — which containerizes contract execution by removing guest operating systems from the protocol.

The speed-up in contract execution will facilitate scaling so that clients can process billions of transactions each year.

Licensing fees introduced for Waves Enterprise users

Waves Enterprise is introducing a new licensing for Waves Enterprises proprietary technologies.

The new policy enables private networks able to operate in test mode without licensing until reaching a block height of 30,000 — which Waves estimates takes two weeks.

Entities will need to purchase a license to continue operation on the Waves Enterprise platform after reaching a block height of 30,000.

Licenses are available for trial use, commercial use and non-commercial use over one-year, two-year or indefinite periods.

Waves also reportedly provides free mainnet licenses to node operators holding a set quantity of WEST tokens.

Optimization and private data introduced for Node operators

Waves Enterprise now supports the uploading and exchange of private data among all node operators, which was previously only available through running a Node API.

Waves also claims it has “optimized” the enterprise network’s node nucleus, significantly reducing the resources required for node operators to maintain current throughput.

Version 1.2 supports anchoring across private networks based on Waves technology

The upgraded platform introduces ‘anchoring’ — which allows multiple enterprise networks to interconnect and so that the data written to one blockchain can be copied to other chains within the network.

Anchoring can occur between networks operating across Waves Enterprise, Waves Platform, and private networks built using Waves technology.

Version 1.2 will also include a new data crawler.

Competition among enterprise blockchain platforms increases

An increasing number of firms are seeking to launch enterprise blockchain solutions as distributed ledger technology adoption grows among major corporations.

Global taxation firm Ernst and Young (EY) will launch their forthcoming enterprise protocol Baseline in partnership with Microsoft and Consensys next month. The platform will support zero-knowledge proofs, distributed identity, and off-chain storage to protect corporate privacy.

At the start of March, Boeing announced it had inked a partnership with multinational aerospace conglomerate Boeing to sell $1 billion worth of spare aviation parts using Honeywell’s customize version of Hyperledger's Fabric.