By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 18th, 2024
Together, the companies will explore how attestations could serve the needs of developers and organizations.
Microsoft and Tierion have officially confirmed the collaboration on a service that will enable linking data to the blockchain to prove the data’s integrity and existence.
Tierion together with Microsoft’s decentralized identity initiative will be used to generate attestations that can be verified with no need to rely on a trusted authority. Microsoft sees the mission of its decentralized identity initiative in allowing people and organizations controlling their identity and related data. The company is developing a technology to let users sign data, claims, or agreements with their identities. Attestations are these very bits of identity-signed data.
Microsoft promised to make an online course available in the future. The attestation received after the completion of the required work will be digitally signed by the educational organization’s decentralized identifier and a timestamp proof that is rooted in a secure public blockchain. In this case, blockchain will serve as a root of trust. Attestations will be kept in secure datastores that are fully controlled by users.
“Tierion is a leader in anchoring data to blockchains.” says Daniel Buchner, Microsoft’s Head of Decentralized Identity. “We’re excited to collaborate with them to advance our decentralized identity initiative. There is great potential to help organizations improve security and reduce compliance costs.”
Tierion links data to the blockchain and generates a timestamp proof of the data’s integrity and existence. This proof allows to independently verify the data without relying on a trusted authority. According to the company, several enterprise customers are participating in pilot programs, which is aimed at the creation of an immutable audit trail of business processes.
“Working with Microsoft helps us further our goal of building a global proof engine”, says Tierion CEO, Wayne Vaughan. “For many use cases it’s better to link your existing systems to the blockchain instead of building your own blockchain. We were thrilled when Microsoft approached us about working together.”
In November, Microsoft announced the launch of an early version of the Bletchley v1 infrastructural substrate to the marketplace. The step is the next stage of Microsoft’s support of blockchain on Microsoft Azure.
Bletchley project that was initially introduced in June is an Ethereum-based technology that allows to quickly create blockchains with a preselected set of trusted nodes managing the consensus process. Users can interact with these nodes to submit transactions and a set of mining nodes per consortium member to record transactions.
Microsoft sees the project as the reflection of company’s vision for an open, modular blockchain fabric powered by Azure.