Japanese blockchain startup Tech Bureau and open source project NEM have announced a partnership to develop a new blockchain engine, codenamed, “Catapult” – a newly amended and augmented version of the current Mijin platform.

Mijin is a private blockchain product, developed by the three core developers of NEM along with Tech Bureau since the fall of 2015. It is a high-performance product that can handle high transaction throughputs, such as 4 digits per second, even on a geographically dispersed network. Tech Bureau pointed out that Mijin has been proven that it can be applied for bank ledger systems last month by a third party test initiated by a major Japanese bank through Dragonfly Fintech, which uses Mijin at its core.

Catapult has been under development since the first quarter of 2016 in stealth mode. Tech Bureau said that it is committed to the open source project of NEM and will contribute this code base into the NEM open source project when it is completed without any commercial implication. Through this, the startup aims to make Mijin and NEM a strong blockchain solution, and to accelerate the growth of TB, its partners, and NEM in a tightly knitted alliance.

Calling Catapult as “improved core solution”, Tech Bureau said that the entire architecture will be revamped and will allow for critical and secure operation, and deployment, particularly in the financial services industry. It added that Catapult will mark the beginning of an enterprise class approach and will create a new standard of design.

“Mijin was good for the bank, but Catapult will blow the water out in its performance, architecture, and ease of security configuration and integration into the core banking system. It not only will provide for enhanced throughputs, but the design is broken up into application specific servers for ease of management in a decentralised environment, whether privately or publicly deployed. It shall form the core of the Dragonfly offering, no doubt.” said Lon Wong of Dragonfly Fintech Pte Ltd.

Some of the new features in the architecture include:

• Migration from Java to C++ for improved performance
• Optimization of memory management
• Improvement in flexibility
• Improvement in throughput
• Improvement in overall performance
• Improvement in stability
• Switching from http protocol to socket communication
• Optimization of network communication

Tech Bureau announced that it shall contribute the commercial version of Mijin as an open-source product this summer, with a dual-licensing scheme. However, the official launch date hasn’t been confirmed yet.

“It’s an unprecedented and big challenge for us all to develop products in a more efficient way than ever by fusing a commercial entity and an open source community into one, without conflict, and without interfering the very existence of an open source initiative. However, once the ball gets rolling, future versions of Mijin and NEM will be historical outcomes of this totally new ecosystem”, said Takao Asayama, CEO of Tech Bureau.