Ardor allows Enterprise customers to run child chains which connect to the main Ardor blockchain. Jelurida, a company formed in the Netherlands in 2016, controls the Ardor main blockchain and sells licenses for those private child chains and also provides software development for Enterprises that don’t want to, or can’t, do the job in house. Ardor child chains have the benefit of being “prunable”, meaning that transactions can be removed from the record when it’s not necessary to keep them, allowing Enterprises to keep their child chains from becoming bloated.
Ardor is based off of NXT, an existing blockchain, which gives Ardor a solid foundation despite being relatively new. The first child chain of Ardor, Ignis, was launched recently and allows for anyone to create and exchange digital assets directly in the Ignis chain.
