What’s better than a blockchain project? How about a finished one.

Incumbent Citibank, established financial player Nasdaq, and shiny new blockchain startup Chain have partnered to bring blockchain to Nasdaq customers, the companies announced today during the Consensus 2017 conference.

A project three years in the making — according to Adam Ludwin, CEO of blockchain startup Chain — this effort links Nasdaq’s blockchain platform, Linq, to the newly developed Citi Connect for Blockchain. The partnership allows Nasdaq customers to send and receive payments through the blockchain. (Chain’s Cross-Core product is the underlying technology.)

All three financial players acknowledged the importance of having a working product — this isn’t a preview or proof-of-work, per Ludwin, but a live service — when it came to developing the project.

Completion of the network also speaks to a growing awareness of blockchain’s perks among incumbent institutions such as Citi and Nasdaq.

“It turns out it’s very easy to say the words, ‘experimenting with blockchain,’ but to actually do it — it’s something we’ve been focused on for the past several years,” Vanessa Colella, chief innovation officer for Citi.

The guiding force for both Nasdaq and Citi, according to company representatives, was customer service — though creating new innovations was decidedly a perk.

“Nasdaq got more and more enamored with blockchain — bitcoin really opened everyone’s eyes to the benefits of a decentralized system,” said Brad Peterson, chief technology and chief information officer for Nasdaq.

It is worth noting that bitcoin is probably opening more people’s eyes as we speak, given its celebratory current valuation of just about $2,200 at the time of this reporting.

Nasdaq’s work with blockchain has reached the point where it considers Linq, its blockchain platform, to now be “an innovation platform,” Peterson said.

One of the most important facets of this project was where Citi was going to be directing its energy — the bank realized three years ago that blockchain technology would become “critical to our industry,” according to Colella, but it still took time to identify the perfect use of the bank’s resources.

“Blockchain is so nascent we didn’t want to experiment with something that didn’t solve a customer problem,” Morgan McKenney, head of cash management for treasury and trade at Citi, said during the announcement. “Given Nasdaq’s focus on blockchain, we knew it would be a strategic [partnership].”