Yet another proprietary blockchain architecture is going open-source.

Chain Inc., a two-year-old startup backed up by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and several other financial institutions, today released its distributed ledger on GitHub under a free license. The move comes just days after another blockchain developer called R3CEV LLC announced plans to contribute the code for its rival system to a banking consortium.

Both firms decided to open up their respective technologies with the same goal in mind: widening adoption. Releasing a software product into the public domain allows organizations and developers who weren’t able to try it before become involved without a significant entry cost.

As a result, Chain can likely expect to see a surge in pilot implementations of its blockchain technology over the coming quarters. The startup has released a Java development kit, code samples and other programming resources alongside the platform in an effort to help streamline such proof-of-concept deployments.

Adopters will have a choice between setting up the system on their own infrastructure or a cloud environment called “testnet” that Chain has set up in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts. The latter group is an academic consortium consisting of Cornell University, UC Berkeley and several other top universities that focuses on fostering blockchain adoption. Microsoft’s interest in Chain, meanwhile, is likely more commercially oriented: It offers a paid blockchain hosting service that could be useful for enterprise users who are relying on the startup’s platform.

One of the highest-profile adopters is Visa Inc., which is employing the software to power a system called B2B Connect for processing international business transactions. Such customers also stand to gain from Chain’s move to open-source its technology thanks to the fact that third-party developers can now contribute code, feedback and other input to the upstream project. The more participants be it draws, the faster the feature development.

Image via Chain