The Factom Foundation has released the next generation of its decentralised, federated blockchain – the Factom Federation network. The team has spent the last year working towards this second major version release of the core Factom software.

Paul Snow, co-founder and chief Architect of Factom Foundation, said in a statement: "It has been inspiring and affirming to have a large community of like-minded individuals that has support us as we built this amazing technology."

He said Factom Federation includes several protocol changes and a networking change that gives the ability to do further upgrades on the following:

● Eight Federated Servers – Increased censorship resistance and globally distributed.

● Eight Auditing Servers – Eight new auditing servers supporting the network.

● Confirmations in seconds instead of minutes – 600X improvement

● More transactions per second – 5X improvement.

● Merkle Proofs More Accessible – Proof of Existence made easy with the factomd API.

● Distributed Peer to Peer Network – Resistant to denial of service type attacks.

● Graphic Control Panel For Nodes – Easily see the activities of the Factom network.

● BIP 44 Wallet Support – Factoids can now be integrated into a wider range of wallets.

● Robust Testing Infrastructure – New public test net and suite of testing tools.

● Support For Multiple Blockchains – Bitcoin and now the Ethereum network.

Factom recently partnered with Smartrac, a company which provides Radio-frequency identification (RFID) combined with internet of things (IoT), to launch an authentication system for vital documents from land titles to medical records.