Japanese blockchain startup Tech Bureau has announced the highly anticipated public release of mijin v.2, codenamed “Catapult.”

Tech Bureau and open source project NEM partnered in 2016 to develop Catapult – an amended and augmented version of the mijin platform. Last month, Tech Bureau’s private blockchain solution mijin v.1 was adopted for use by the Azure Marketplace running on Microsoft Japan’s Azure cloud platform.

The public release follows the developer preview of Catapult released earlier this spring.

Catapult is a full-featured, blockchain engine delivering a new version of the NEM protocol for both public and private networks for enterprise. It represents a commercial open source approach to an enterprise distributed ledger offering built by Tech Bureau, powering both public blockchain networks, like NEM, as well as larger-scale, high-throughput enterprise distributed ledger deployments, complete with unique smart contract plugins. These plugins enable bulletproof digital asset creation, decentralized swaps, advanced account systems and business logic modeling.

According to the official release, Catapult has introduced features that are currently not available on any other blockchain, including aggregated transactions and multi-level, multi-signature accounts. These features will accelerate enterprise blockchain adoption with the ease of use and implementation capabilities in a number of sectors including electronic money systems, user authentication, land and property registration, logistics tracking, and food traceability, among others.

In addition, Tech Bureau has also announced the launch of a self-service, on-demand developer lab that will enable companies and individuals to get started on Catapult quickly without having to manage their own infrastructure.

“This is a key milestone on the roadmap to release the Catapult blockchain platform publicly as well as launch the developer lab, which will lay the groundwork for our mijin enterprise cloud offering”, said Tech Bureau North America CEO Tom Beno. “Entering this new phase, we are closer than ever to realizing the promise of bringing the latest version of our blockchain technology to both private and public networks such as NEM.”

Tech Bureau said that it is planning a production-ready enterprise version, along with open source and commercial licensing, for the second half of 2018.