A collaborating cross-industry blockchain effort Hyperledger Project has welcomed American Express (AmEx) as its premier member. The American multinational financial services corporation will be joining other consortium members in contributing to the development of the project’s mission to create and build an open source and enterprise-grade blockchain.

The announcement follows after the blockchain project added eight new members by the end of 2016 that included Factom Foundation, Hashed Health, Swisscom, LedgerDomain, Lykke, among others.

Sastry Durvasula, Senior Vice President of Technology at AmEx who is responsible for the company’s blockchain, digital payments and partnerships; will be representing the company on the Hyperledger Governing Board.

“We’re excited to join Hyperledger, as we’re looking to take full advantage of blockchain to deliver new and innovative products for our customers and partners while transforming existing business processes and applications. As a Premier member of the project, we’re expecting our expertise and global reach to help advance this open source blockchain ecosystem,” Marc Gordon, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, American Express, stated.

The blockchain project reached 100 member milestone last November and aims to foster organizations to form a robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems in order to provide support to its individual business transaction. It seeks to achieve this by creating an enterprise-grade, open-source blockchain framework and code base.