Tokyo & Dusseldorf, July 7, 2017 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced that it has joined Hyperledger as a Premier member, emphasizing NEC's commitment to leverage its innovative research to both advance blockchain technology as well as its global adoption.

Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technologies and services around the globe by addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers.

Recent years have seen an increasing focus on devising novel secure and scalable blockchain platforms that address the needs of many industrial use cases. NEC has been leading academic research on blockchain security since the introduction of the Bitcoin system.

In December 2016, NEC Laboratories Europe released, together with Aalto University, a novel blockchain consensus technology based on Byzantine fault tolerant protocols. This technology builds on hardware-based trusted execution environments and combines their use with lightweight secret sharing. NEC's technology can achieve a throughput over 100,000 transactions per second – making it the world's fastest and most scalable Byzantine fault tolerant protocols to date.

"NEC's global reach will be a huge asset, as we continue to grow the commercial ecosystem for Hyperledger technologies," said Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Executive Director. "We welcome NEC and look forward to collaborating with them to help develop an open, distributed ledger technology that makes business processes transparent and solves interoperability across many industries."

"NEC is promoting the transformative benefits of blockchain technology and advancing its adoption by contributing our expertise and knowledge to the Hyperledger community," said Dr. Juergen Quittek, Vice President at NEC Laboratories Europe.

For more information on NEC's security solutions, please visit www.nec.com.

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