The Blockchain Embassy of Asia (BCE) earlier this month launched Malaysia’s first public blockchain consortium that is entirely focused on the adoption and improvement of distributed ledgers and their competing protocols.

Launched on 02 December 2016, the consortium’s members currently include R1 (Mark Smalley from Neuroware), Maybank, RHB, Mah Weng Kwai (legal firm), CapitalBay, 1337 Ventures, Chain of Things, ATAplus, and iTrainAsia, Bitcoin Malaysia reported. With these nine members, BCE has achieved the first milestone by assembling the minimum members needed to form the Malaysian Steering Committee.

According to the website, the consortium’s mission is to:

“Educate organizations throughout Asia on both the legal and technical implications of distributed ledgers.”

In addition to providing paid-workshops and ideation sessions to certain organizations to help expedite their understanding of blockchains, the embassy also provides a secure web-accessible platform for developing blockchain-powered products within a safe, controlled environment.

Kuala Lumpur-based blockchain-focused startup Neuroware introduced BCE in October this year. It described BCE.asia as a community effort for educating other organizations and agencies throughout Southeast Asia about both the technical and legal implications of distributed ledgers.

“We are a working group that has been formed in order to explore the distributed nature of blockchain based governance and shared public record keeping within a controlled environment where all partners are equal and have access to everything”, Neuroware said.

According to the official website, the Blockchain Embassy of Asia is a non-profit digitally distributed organization that is using and promoting blockchain governance as a method for collaboration between various business entities and existing community efforts across Asia.