Stratumn is building a sort of Heroku for blockchain applications

Meet Stratumn, a Paris-based startup that wants to create a platform-as-a-service for developers interested in the blockchain. With Stratumn, you can build, deploy and run applications on the company’s platform, and these applications can communicate with the bitcoin blockchain. It’s like Heroku, but for blockchain developers.

The company just raised $670,000 (€600,000) from Otium Venture and business angels, such as Ledger Wallet CEO Eric Larchevêque.

At heart, the bitcoin blockchain is a distributed database that registers all bitcoin transactions with a timestamp. Many have taken advantage of the blockchain to build applications that were unrelated to bitcoin transactions.

For instance, Stampery wants to replace notaries with the bitcoin blockchain. The service can issue legally binding proofs for all your sensitive documents, and these proofs live on the blockchain.

But Stratumn is taking this idea one step further and saying that other startups like Stampery are going to appear. Instead of having to redo the hard work from scratch, Stratumn lets your application talk with the blockchain without any effort from your side.

In order to do this, Stratumn has built an open specification called Chainscript. Without getting too technical, Chainscript files are JSON files that can store a bit of data. You send these this data to the blockchain using Stratumn. And later, you can retrieve and audit these packets of data if you follow the Chainscript format.

In other words, a company like Stampery could have built its platform on top of Stratumn using Chainscript. Contracts and notarized documents are one thing, but Stratumn can take another dimension with other blockchains.

While the biggest blockchain is the bitcoin’s blockchain, foundations and companies are working on other blockchains. It’s still the very beginning for the young startup, but if Stratumn can build a blockchain-agnostic platform that works with private blockchains or alternative blockchains, Stratumn could become a nifty way to effortlessly build applications on top of decentralized databases. And it could lead to interesting blockchain use cases.