Ardor, a “child chain” platform developed by the Nxt core dev team, is announced. The news comes amidst reports of The DAO hack. The event, which led to up 3 million Ether being lost to attackers, has had a very negative impact on Ethereum - the most popular Blockchain-as-a-Service platform so far.

Nxt’s new Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) framework will allow anyone - from individual users, to fintech startups, to large corporations - to easily build their own Nxt 2.0 child blockchains with different features and tunable parameters.

The main goal for the developers seems to not be to deliver the ability to build anything on a Blockchain (like Ethereum does via smart contracts), but rather focus on perfecting particular meaningful use cases.

Those solutions will then be able to be plugged in on the different child chains, and finely tuned at the users’ discretion.

What is Ardor?

Ardor’s decentralized asset exchange feature will enable the users to trade any assets on any of the child chains, as well as between them. Decentralized voting and governance systems will also be built in, to allow secure and anonymous voting on the Blockchain.

Like Nxt, Ardor will also support smart, or phased transactions, where several conditions can be set before a transaction can be executed.

In order to ensure the high speed and security of the network, all the child chains are connected to the original and already powerful Nxt 1.0 Blockchain.

One of the main innovations of Ardor is the idea to separate the transactions that don’t affect security from those that do. The first group will then be moved entirely onto the many child chains.

That will allow the original Nxt Blockchain to serve as a supplier of secure, high-speed transactions for all the practical solutions implemented on the 2.0 child chains, ensuring their high scalability.

Bas Wisselink, one of chief representatives of Nxt, says:

“The new Ardor design honors many requests from the market. With the ability to create customisable and easily deployed child chains, combined with Assets that can be traded system-wide, Ardor offers great value to the growing industry.”

Blockchain-as-a-Service

Ever since the launch of Ethereum in July 2015, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) has become a major trend in the fintech industry.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Blockchain could greatly enhance the security, reliability and efficiency of a huge number of systems, at the same time cutting their costs.

A number of Blockchain projects have appeared on the scene, that are trying to improve such use cases as cloud storage, cloud computation, governance, and even the Web itself.

The realization that it may be easier to just provide the tools for people and companies to build their own Blockchain solutions, gave birth to several BaaS initiatives, such as Ethereum, Lisk, and now Ardor.

How to participate

Ardor tokens are planned to be released on October 12, 2016. Starting on July 14, Nxt will start taking hourly snapshots of the wallets of every holder of the currency.

On October 12, each user’s total amount of Nxt will be averaged, and they will receive that amount of Ardor tokens. That will happen simultaneously with the launch of Nxt 1.9, which is already in development.

Ardor tokens are planned to be freely tradeable up until the launch of the actual Ardor system later down the line.