Citizens Reserve Partners With Comcast-Backed Blockchain Startup

Blockchain startup Citizens Reserve is partnering with enterprise software startup Blockdaemon to more rapidly deploy nodes.

Announced Wednesday, the partnership is aimed at helping Citizens Reserve, lead by a team of former Deloitte blockchain employees, and its clients more quickly deploy nodes using tools developed by Blockdaemon, enabling users to more easily join the former's SUKU "supply chain-as-a-service" blockchain platform.

This, in turn, aims to reduce the time and effort required by clients before they can begin processing transactions through SUKU, which is built upon the Quorum blockchain.

Blockdaemon specializes in helping groups deploy blockchain networks. It received venture funding from the venture wing of telecommunications giant Comcast, as previously reported by CoinDesk.

Citizens Reserve CEO Eric Piscini told CoinDesk that the partnership has been several months in the making, and while his startup is still optimizing its product, the two companies will begin offering clients this new assistance by the end of the year.

"We want to be able to deploy a node into one of our technology partners in an hour, that's the goal. We were able to do that [and] we exceeded expectations [by deploying] within 15 minutes," he told CoinDesk.

Konstantin Richter, CEO and founder of Blockdaemon, told CoinDesk that the Citizens Reserve team was "always on the cutting edge of the latest blockchain tooling."

"Citizens Reserve is aiming to offer a very professional and functional product for the supply-chain vertical, where participants are focused on their use-case, rather than extensive back-end [and] infrastructure orchestration," he explained in an email.

Blockdaemon similarly hopes to "offer security and decentralization combined with ease of use," chiefly by simplifying the process of deploying, connecting and monitoring nodes, he added.

The partnership will be a long-term arrangement as well, according to Piscini. While the existing marketplace is "working great," the companies are continuing to integrate their platforms and services.

"It's a real partnership that's extremely critical ... we're not here for one event or one activity, we're here for the very long term," he concluded.

Freight train image via Shutterstock