The Makers' Blockchain Design.
Thelonious is Eris Industries’ open-source blockchain design. Thelonious is both smart contract enabled as well as smart contract controlled. Thelonious is a heavily modified version of Jeffrey Wilcke’s
Go client for the ethereum protocol. See Eris History
It is fully parameterisable - you can use tokens mining if the application calls for it, but you don't have to.
Thelonious is not a single blockchain, it is a blockchain design. It is purposely designed not to be one blockchain, but millions of them: to complement, rather than compete with, its larger, fully-distributed cousins. Although at its base level Thelonious can deploy a blockchain which has the same parameters as the draft ethereum blockchain, Thelonious was designed with a different set of parameters in mind. We have designed Thelonious as a corporate-, organisation-, family-, or application-specific blockchain to work in conjunction with the Decerver and the other components of Eris Industries’ Distributed Application Software Stack.
Thelonious allows developers to use blockchain architecture to design, test, deploy, and operate distributed applications. Developers who use a Thelonious client to manage their blockchains are able to benefit from having a parameterized smart contract in the genesis block which is capable of managing the consensus and security mechanism of the blockchain through the use of smart contracts. By moving the block consensus and security mechanism out of the client and placing those parameters and instructions into the blockchain itself, we have been able to significantly diversify the types of blockchains which a single client can manage.