Juniper Research, the UK-based market research company, has announced the winners of this year’s Future Digital Awards for Commerce & Fintech.

“The Future Digital Awards are given to companies that Juniper believes have made significant progress within their sector during the previous year, and are now poised to make considerable market impact in the future”, Juniper Research said.

Blockchain startup Chain’s Open Standard protocol has been named as the winner in the “Best Fintech Innovation” category, and Circle Pay App by Circle Internet Financial Ltd is the runner-up.

Chain, Inc. is an enterprise software company that partners with leading financial firms to design and build blockchain networks. It developed and maintains the Chain Open Standard, an open source blockchain protocol for high-scale financial applications. Chain's platform includes Chain Core, an enterprise-grade production node, and the Chain Sandbox prototyping environment.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Chain has raised $45M from leading venture capital firms and strategic investors. The company's board of directors includes the former CEO of American Express as well as one of the founding executives of PayPal.

"We're very grateful to be recognized for our work on the Chain protocol," said Devon Gundry, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, Chain. "Working closely with our industry partners, we set out to invent a new format for financial assets that would dramatically change the pace of innovation in banking, payments, and capital markets. The Chain protocol is the culmination of that collaboration. It is the product of years of research, design, and engineering that we believe will reshape financial services.”

In addition, EdgeVerve Systems Finacle Omnichannel hub won the “Digital Banking – Best System Solution” category. EdgeVerve Systems is a product subsidiary of Infosys, which offers the Infosys Finacle universal banking solution suite. In April, it introduced its EdgeVerve Blockchain Framework designed to further the adoption of blockchain technology by the global financial services sector.

Last month, Infosys Finacle announced that it has been named a leader by Forrester Research, Inc. in ‘The Forrester Wave: Customer-Centric Global Banking Platforms, Q3 2016’ report. Finacle was recognized as a leader among nine top banking platforms, which were evaluated on a comprehensive set of 40 criteria focusing on strategy, current offering and market presence.