Microsoft has announced Coco Framework that will reduce current limitations of the enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.
Started as a collaboration between Azure and Microsoft Research, Coco is an open source framework, designed to deliver key enterprise requirements-improved and business specific confidentiality, scalability, desired processing power and distributed governance.
The Coco Framework is designed for confidential consortiums, specifically. It will work with any ledger protocol, any hypervisor and operating system that is compatible with Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) such as Intel SGX and Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM).
Additionally, this Framework is capable of operating from anywhere – both in cloud and on premises.
“Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business,” said Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer of Azure at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise. We have listened to the needs of our customers and the blockchain community and are bringing foundational functionality with the Coco Framework. Through an innovative combination of advanced algorithms and trusted execution environments, like Intel’s Software Guard Extensions or Windows Virtual Secure Mode, we believe this takes the next step toward making blockchain ready for business.”
Microsoft will make this blockchain technology widely available across different sectors – financial services, supply chain and logistics, healthcare and retail.
Also read:Microsoft’s new addition to Blockchain-as-a-Service to improve its utility for enterprises
Coco Framework is not a distributed ledger rather it is designed to integrate with other ledgers, emerging from different vendors. As of now, R3 Corda, Intel Hyperledger Sawtooth, J.P. Morgan Quorum, and Ethereum will integrate their distributed ledgers with Coco.
Microsoft will launch the framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source project.
Microsoft has also launched a technical whitepaper for all those who are willing to seek in-depth information.
