It has been said that blockchain technology can have a huge impact in the business world, enabling new kinds of services while at the same time making systems more secure.
Microsoft is one of those looking for ways to take advantage of Bitcoin’s underlying technology (and technology behind other cryptocurrencies, for that matter) and make it available for its enterprise clientele.
The software giant was one of the founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) where it’s working with other major corporations, startups and other organizations to create standards and technologies that would make these new services possible.
Public ledger challenges
Peer-to-peer money transfer may be useful, but enterprises have bigger plans for blockchain, and some of those plans require increased security that can’t be easily achieved within a public ledger. Also, these companies and their clients require scalability and performance which is seldom achieved with the public system where it can take minutes (or more) for every transaction to be “properly” confirmed.
Safeguards included with these systems do ensure the integrity of public blockchain networks, but on the other hand – they require tradeoffs in terms of key enterprise requirements such as confidentiality.
So Microsoft decided to come up with its own solution…
Coco Framework
Microsoft’s Coco Framework is an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements — providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.
Designed specifically for confidential consortiums — where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled — Coco provides enterprises with an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving them the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality.
The system leverages the “power of existing blockchain protocols,” trusted execution environments (TEEs) such as Intel SGX and Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), distributed systems and cryptography to enable enterprise-ready blockchain networks that deliver:
- Throughput and latency approaching database speeds.
- Richer, more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models.
- Network policy management through distributed governance.
- Support for non-deterministic transactions.
Microsoft has already begun exploring Coco’s potential across different industries, including retail, supply chain and financial services.
“Being able to run our existing supply chain Dapp code much faster within Coco framework is a great performance improvement that will reduce friction when we talk about enterprise Blockchain readiness with our retail customers,” Tom Racette, VP of Global Retail Business Development at Mojix, said in a statement. “Adding data confidentiality support without sacrificing this improvement is what will enable us to lead the digital transformation we are envisioning with Smart Supply Chains.”
The Redmond-based giant added it is the only cloud provider that delivers consistency across on-premises and the public cloud at hyperscale while providing access to the Azure ecosystem for the wide range of applications that will be built on top of blockchain as a shared data layer.
Integrating Ethereum into Coco…
As an open platform, Coco can sing along any blockchain protocol. In fact, Microsoft has already begun integrating Ethereum into Coco and has announced that J.P. Morgan Chase, Intel and R3 have committed to integrating their enterprise ledgers — Quorum, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Corda, respectively.
J.P. Morgan Chase’s Quorum system aims to toe the line between private and public in the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. On one hand, it will satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on, and on the other — protect privacy of parties that don’t wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public.
Hyperledger Sawtooth, on the other hand, is a modular platform that enables building, deploying, and running of distributed ledgers. So far, it has been used to create solutions for the seafood industry, finance (bond trading and settlement) and a generic marketplace for digital assets.
Finally, Corda was designed to enable “frictionless commerce,” providing the financial grade distributed ledger that operates in strict privacy in an open, global network.
More to come…
The examples highlighted above are just the beginning for Coco, according to Microsoft; and ConsenSys’ founder Joseph Lubin shares that belief: “Microsoft’s Coco Framework represents a breakthrough in achieving highly scalable, confidential, permissioned Ethereum or other blockchain networks that will be an important construct in the emerging world of variously interconnected blockchain systems,” he said.
Coco has started as a collaboration between Azure and Microsoft Research, but has later been expanded to include input of dozens of customers and partners.
Opening up Coco is a way to scale development of the platform, with the goal to contribute the source code to the community in early 2018. In the meantime, we hope to learn about other interesting Coco integrations.