Something on the Side: Stratis Offering Sidechains to Businesses

Stratis says it wants to make blockchain easy for your business, which is why it operates a platform to help you develop your own blockchain applications. Now it is offering something else: sidechains.

Sidechains are separate blockchains attached to parent blockchains, or “mainchains.” Tokens can be used in these side chains but then moved back to the mainchains as needed.

Customized for Your Needs

“Aside from leaving the mainchain free to exchange funds, Stratis sidechains make it possible to specify both the block size and block interval, increasing the number of transactions in each block and/or reducing the time between each block,” the company said in its announcement.

Vaibhav Saini, co-founder and senior software engineer at TowardsBlockchain, tells ThirtyK, “Sidechains can be implemented to literally any industry that is looking to use blockchain for their operations. Taking Amazon as an example, [it] could open a sidechain (for payments of goods) for small regions according to respective regional traffic.”

Saini does caution that sidechains need to be implemented properly in a system to provide a seamless and secure experience. “The efficiency of the sidechains is greatly dependent on the developers developing it for the enterprise,” he says.

Blockchain in C Sharp

Saini, whose company helps businesses implement blockchain solutions, says the decision to create sidechains was the “perfect move” for a blockchain-as-a-service company such as Stratis.

He adds that its use of C# (pronounced “C sharp”) for its sidechains is “a holy grail for enterprise.” C# is the most popular enterprise programming language, according to Stratis, and the company chose it for the development of applications on its platform. The company also picked the Microsoft.NET Framework, which Stratis says is the most widely used enterprise framework.

Headquartered in London, Stratis was founded in 2016 by CEO Chris Trew, an enterprise IT consultant.

The company’s stratis (STRAT) token is currently traded on the Poloniex, Bittrex and Bittylicious exchanges and has a market capitalization of about $277 million, according to ThirtyK data supplied by CoinMarketCap.