Microsoft announces the Coco Framework for blockchain networks to improve performance, confidentiality, and governance of enterprises

by Najuka G

Blockchain technology is generating significant interest across a wide range of industries in India. As the field of applications for Blockchain grows, Microsoft is continuously working with customers, partners and the blockchain community to continue advancing blockchain’s enterprise readiness. Keeping in line with this, Microsoft announced its new Coco Framework, a first-of-its-kind innovation that aims to advance enterprise adoption of blockchain. Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business. Coco is the foundation of blockchain for the enterprise. It addresses key elements that businesses are demanding.

Current blockchain protocol technology requires complicated development techniques to meet the operational and security needs of enterprises. The Coco Framework reduces this complexity and when integrated with popular blockchain protocols like Ethereum or Corda, Coco addresses and improves on critical needs for commercial blockchain applications including high transaction speed (faster by roughly 100 times), distributed governance (network constitution that allows members to vote) and confidentiality (without compromising performance). Coco by design is open and compatible with any ledger protocol and can operate in the cloud and on premises. Initial ledger integration partners include R3, Intel and JP Morgan Chase, which have agreed to integrate their proprietary blockchain ledger platforms with the Coco Framework.

Coco provides foundational capabilities that open up more complex, real world blockchain scenarios across industries – like financial services, healthcare and retail – further proving blockchain’s potential to digitally transform business. Microsoft will launch the framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source project.

Blockchain in India is ready to be taken to the next level. Recently, Microsoft was selected as the exclusive cloud partner by BankChain, a platform for banks in India (comprising State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, DCB Bank, Kotak Bank, Bank of Baroda, Deutsche Bank, and others) to explore, build, and implement blockchain solutions using Microsoft Azure Blockchain.

For more information, you can view the Microsoft Press Release. You can also read more and view a demo about the workings of the Coco Framework in an Azure Blog as well as a new Whitepaper from Microsoft on GitHub. Let me know if you have any questions.