Stratis, a UK-based blockchain development platform, has announced the release of nStratis Development Framework (SDF), which will enable blockchain development in C# and .NET.

“SDF marks a major milestone accomplished by the Stratis development team that will allow support for accelerated development of powerful, open source, cross-platform blockchain applications on Microsoft’s .net framework”, Stratis said.

Originally intended to be released in early 2017, Stratis said that the launch of its Blockchain Development Framework follows its successful crowdfund held earlier this year. According to the announcement, the initial release provides a blockchain development toolkit for developers, such as an API and a TransactionBuilder that supports all the standard transactions, such as record keeping on the Stratis blockchain, timestamping and proof of existence.

“The work required for the creation of our Stratis #C full node involves two major tasks: a complete rewrite of POS in C# and the refactoring required, also the forking of nBitcoin to support the Stratis blockchain and its many diversions from Bitcoin. Today we are proud to announce that we have completed the latter, thanks to the invaluable dedication of our top developers Nicolas Dorier and Dan Gershony, whose technical expertise has made this possible well before the Dec-Jan goals set in our road map”, said Chris Trew, Stratis CEO.

Features include full script evaluation and parsing; a RPC Client; a Rest Client; the parsing of standard scripts and creation of custom ones; the serialization of blocks, transactions and script; the signing and verification with private keys (with support for compact signatures) for proving ownership; mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys (BIP 39), credits to Thasshiznets; Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP 32); Payment Protocol (BIP 70); Payment URLs (BIP 21,BIP 72); and Two-Factor keys (BIP 38).

Stratis is now inviting developers to start coding and test the capabilities of the open source SDF that can be found at Github. It recommends reading the documentation on nBitcoin, which is bitcoin specific but has many similarities with Stratis.

“We are, of course. working on Stratis specific documentation and will get that to you as soon as it is ready for distribution”, Stratis added.

In addition, the company also introduced the Stratis Developer Academy, through which it plans to offer a range of educational and promotional services such as training webinars, mentorship and certifications as well as competitions and events. It will be a permanent program aimed at nurturing and growing the Stratis developer community.

As an inaugural event, the company will be holding the first Stratis Hackathon for developers in the upcoming weeks.