US Navy drops $9.5 million on a new blockchain messaging system

The US Navy wants to improve the security of its internal messaging system, and it’s turning to blockchain company SIMBA Chain to do it.

SIMBA Chain announced yesterday that it has secured a $9.5 million contract from the US Navy to “deploy a secure, blockchain-based messaging and transaction platform” for the Department of Defense (DoD).

The system, which runs on Microsoft Azure, will make it easier to share information between the Navy and its air power. Uses of the new contract include secure messaging, supply chains, and financial transactions.

The contract between the Navy and SIMBA Chain will run for five years. SIMBA Chain was itself the result of a 2017 DARPA Grant, awarded to the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing and ITAMCO.

“This is a win not just for SIMBA and our partners, but also for the DoD, which has pursued with single-minded focus, a solution to conduct sensitive, mission-critical operations in a manner that is immutable and non-refutable,” SIMBA Chain CEO Joel Neidig said in a statement.

The Navy isn’t the only department of the US military that’s recently invested in blockchain. Fluree, a blockchain data management company, this week announced that it signed a contract with the US Air Force. The new system, which will be implemented this year, will allow the US Air Force to keep track of how information gets into its system, and who can access it. 

Like the new contract with SIMBA, Flurree’s designed to meet the Department of Defense’s goal of increasing information sharing across departments.