Symbiont, a New York-based blockchain startup, has announced the release of a software development kit for Assembly, the permissioned distributed ledger component of Symbiont's smart contracts system.

There are two main parts to Symbiont’s Smart Securities platform: a smart contracts system purpose-built for institutional finance, and a distributed ledger, designed for permissioned networks.

“[W]e are releasing Symbiont Assembly, our distributed ledger. Assembly plays a crucial role as the foundation of Symbiont’s platform, but can also be used independently”, Symbiont said in a blog post.

The startup explains that Assembly is a highly secure, high performance Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed ledger appropriate for use in institutional finance. It is able to process a sustained 80,000 transactions per second in a regional multi-node network, which according to Symbiont corresponds to the maximum performance measured in academic studies of the consensus protocol used by Assembly.

Assembly is an immutable and cryptographically secured datastore and messaging system designed for use in a decentralized network. It serves as the foundation for Symbiont's Smart Securities platform, which allows users to issue, manage, locate and trade traditional financial instruments efficiently in a single, global, peer-to-peer financial network.

The Assembly release includes the public specifications for a ledger API, a mock ledger server, a ledger client library, example client applications and integration tests---all of which are hosted on the Symbiont GitHub page.

"We've proven that we can build a fast, secure and powerful distributed ledger capable of meeting the high demands of institutional finance," said Symbiont's co-founder and CTO Adam Krellenstein. "Assembly is now available to developers struggling to achieve an institutional-quality distributed ledger, and we welcome inquiries from those wishing to build blockchain applications on it."

Earlier this year, Symbiont partnered with Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, to enable financial services organizations to securely execute smart contracts and other blockchain-based transactions. In addition, the startup is also working on the Delaware Blockchain Initiative and developing the technical aspects of the initiative.

In March, the company partnered with Ipreo, a leading global provider of financial services technology, data and analytics, to create a new company to overhaul conventional and expensive manual processing in the $3 trillion global syndicated loans market. More recently, Symbiont, along with Credit Suisse, R3, and Ipreo completed successful initial stage of a project to demonstrate how blockchain technology can be used to improve the syndicated loan market.