Microsoft Partners with 5 New Companies for Azure Blockchain as a Service

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by Tatsiana Yablonskaya · 3 min read
Microsoft Partners with 5 New Companies for Azure Blockchain as a Service
Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr

The new wave of partnerships includes financial services platform and decentralized prediction market platform in particular.

Azure Blockchain as a Service has welcomed 5 new partners – Augur, Lisk, BitShares, Svscoin and Slock.it. The news best of all describes Azure Blockchain as a place for partners to put new platforms, frameworks, tools and services for curious customers to discover and experiment with.

Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. It provides precise forecasts on any topic – from politics to commerce, from technology to entertainment. The presence of Augur on Azure enables companies to use prediction markets to forecast different kinds of information: product launch dates, sale level, the necessity to fund projects and other important metrics.

Lisk offers developers to easily deploy their own custom blockchains and program decentralized applications. With its own digital currency Lisk, the company intends to transform decentralized application and blockchain technology.

BitShares is financial services platform for SmartCoins, price-stable digital assets, coupled with a decentralized asset exchange. The industrial-grade blockchain operates at a three-second block interval with peaks to thousands of transaction per second while BitShares reaches this speed and maintains transaction and identity security through a unique democratic consensus algorithm.

Syscoin offers multiple blockchain-enabled services to purchase and sell goods and services, encrypted messaging, escrow, replacement for typical blockchain addresses, digital asset storage, reselling and more. Syscoin is responsible for managing merchants’ way from centralized marketplace solutions to decentralized ones based on the blockchain.

Slock.it will integrate with Microsoft Azure to facilitate the process of building apps for Slock.it first product, the Ethereum Computer.  Apps built on Azure Compute Cloud can be easily deployed without modifications to the Ethereum Computer, which makes the Azure cloud the perfect environment to experiment with Slock.it.

By now Microsoft has partnered with 16 companies for its Azure Blockchain as a Service. In the very beginning, after the announcement of platform, Microsoft teamed up with ConsenSys, a New York-based Ethereum-coder group that will enable enterprise customers on the Azure cloud platform to get an access to the Ethereum Blockchain-as-a-Service (E BaaS).

At the end of 2015 Microsoft announced partnerships with Ripple, the interledger protocol to its blockchain toolkit, as well as with CoinPrism, Eris and Factom.

The very beginning of this year brought Microsoft four new partners to join its Azure Blockchain-as-a-Service platform The list included bitcoin payment processor BitPay, cryptocurrency tax services provider LibraTax, blockchain platform Emercoin and Manifold Technology, a provider of blockchain technology for financial organizations.

The last two companies to join the project recently were AlphaPoint and IOTA . AlphaPoint develops blockchain-based solutions for digital assets storage, tracking and trade with its team having more than 50 years of combined experience in FinTech architecting high-performance financial systems for some of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Azure Marketplace will leverage the company’s platform to test and build blockchain applications using a .NET stack. IOTA offers a fundamental redesign of the conventional blockchain architecture. It is the first Directed Acyclic Graph/Tangle based distributed ledger in the world.

Microsoft confused its customers the other day by its decision to stop accepting bitcoin payments. The official website said: “You can no longer redeem Bitcoin into your Microsoft account”. Nevertheless within hours this notification disappeared. Microsoft didn’t explain what exactly could occur calling what happened ‘a mistake’. Miscrosoft’s representative confirmed: “We continue to support Bitcoin for adding money to your Microsoft Account which can be used for purchasing content in the Windows and Xbox stores. We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected.”

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