Bloq has unveiled its eagerly awaited first product: a multi-pronged blockchain software solution designed to allow enterprise users the ability to create, update, customize and analyze their own public, private, and permissioned blockchains, according to Bloq co-founder Jeff Garzik.
BloqEnterprise will serve as a blockchain operating system (BOS) for private and public blockchains, including the following components:
1) BloqRouter is the fastest, most secure Bitcoin full node on the planet, with a hardened Bitcoin Core fork and option to switch to Bitcoin Classic (BIP 109).
2) BloqDev is a battle-tested, bitcoin-originated enterprise blockchain app development environment for Java, JavaScript and Python.
3) BloqView is a network-level "weather report" dashboard, with data analytics and anomaly detection for public and private blockchain networks that answers key questions enterprise clients need answered.
4) BloqSLA is an enterprise-grade Service Level Agreement for 24-7 support.
5) BloqThink is a high-level strategic professional services component.
While it can be used to build public, private or confederated blockchains, BloqEnterprise incorporates a trustless build architecture, which Garzik calls "the most hardened build infrastructure in fintech," using gitian technology to prove to customers the impossibility of a back-door vulnerability or hack. Hot fixes are delivered within hours, with major updates 2-3 times a year.
Garzik, a long-time Bitcoin core developer, teamed up with serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Matt Roszak in November, 2015, to create off-the-shelf, customizable blockchain solutions. Garzik, who spent more than a decade at open-source software giant, Red Hat, saw the need to provide secure, stable solutions to enterprise users. Using a similar approach, Red Hat became a multi-billion dollar company providing secure, scalable Linux software solutions to the enterprise a decade ago.
"Open source is key to rapid innovation," said Garzik, "and this has been true of both the early days of Linux and cryptocurrency. But at some point, there needs to be an enterprise-grade solution for a technology to be reliable enough to play in the Fortune 500. You can't sit around and hope that unpaid enthusiast volunteers come up with an update. Red Hat solved this problem for the Linux market, and Bloq will solve it for the blockchain."
Adding to the significance of this enterprise suite is the recently announced addition to the Bloq team of Andreas Schildbach, who maintains the bitcoinj repository, as a developer; as well as bitcoin core developer and long-standing chief scientist, Gavin Andresen, and the "father of the smart contract" Nick Szabo as advisors, along with enterprise software entrepreneur Andrew Filipowski, former CFTC chairman James Newsome, and investor/blockchain authority William Mougayar.