Equibit Development Corporation (EDC), a startup company based in Toronto, has announced that it has completed the Supernode installation and a private beta testing phase of the platform will commence soon.

The company aims to deliver a peer-to-peer, over-the-counter (OTC) securities platform built around a new open source blockchain and powered by a state-of-the-art Supernode infrastructure. The company is developing Equibit – a decentralized securities register which will enable issuers to securely communicate with their shareholders, collect votes, distribute earnings, and update their shareholder registers in real-time at little to no cost.

According to the official release, the beta testing group will consist of financial institutions and other power users, of which a leading investor communications firm has already signed on.

EDC explains that 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, providing the utmost level of security over users’ private keys.

“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,” Chris Horlacher, CEO of EDC, said in a statement.

Equinix, which operates over 145 facilities with over 14 million square feet of space around the globe, is coming on as hosting partner for the Supernode. The data centre giant’s strong network and interconnection base helps in decreasing latency, improving performance and reliability of content delivery.

The first Supernode has been placed in Equinix’s TR2 data centre located in downtown Toronto – a Tier 3+ facility with over 100,000 square feet of colocation space, the release said.

Moreover, EDC has teamed up with cloud solutions provider, AirGate Technologies, which will assist it in distributing the Equibit software through services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This will allow companies to rapidly deploy regular Equibit nodes in the cloud and secure the network by adding to its total computing power.

Equibit Development Corporation recently opened a seed round of funding with 10 million common shares available to investors. The company also revealed plans to launch a crowdsale of its equibit tokens in January. 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.