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Microsoft

Microsoft adds 5 blockchain partners to Azure and it still accepts Bitcoin

Last month we talked about the decision of Microsoft Corporation to start testing the blockchain technology and to create its own blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) product.
In fact, Microsoft opened its Azure cloud computing platform, adding a growing number of partners to its BaaS solution including ConsenSys, Emercoin and MultiChain.
And now Microsoft has announced the addition of five new blockchain partners to its Azure platform, including prediction market Augur and Ethereum network Slock.
Some other partners previously announced include Lisk, BitShares, Syscoin, BitPay, Eris Industries and Factom.
microsoft bitcoin

Microsoft still accepts Bitcoin payments

According to CNBC, Microsoft continues to accept Bitcoin among its allowed methods of payment.
On Monday they accidentally announced that it would no longer accept bitcoin, but the company belies this announcement.
In fact, Microsoft Corportation still accepts Bitcoin for purchasing contents in the Windows and Xbox stores.

 

“We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected,” told a company spokesman to CNBC.

 

 

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
Blockchain Data Storage 640x334

How is Blockchain Technology Market Going to Rise at High CAGR of 38.4% Till 2025?

The global Blockchain Technology Market is forecast to rise exponentially in the coming years. The market is expected to witness high demand from diverse industries, especially the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry.

In terms of industry vertical, the banking, financial services, and insurance segment held the leading share of 41% in global blockchain technology market in 2017. The segment will gain further impetus following introduction of bitcoin. “Rampantly increasing cyber-attacks and frauds in the BFSI industry accounts for millions of dollars. This has become a global concern. To make the technology used in the industry safer and more secure, Deloitte and Microsoft Azure and other tech giants are offering blockchain services,” said a lead analyst.

In terms of deployment, the proof of concept segment is gaining traction and is expected to witness impressive growth during the forecast period 2018-2025. Growth witnessed in this segment is backed by high need of transparent transaction across industries such as healthcare, retail and BFSI.

blockchain technology market

Increasing Demand for Secure Blockchain Technology to Guarantee Growth at Promising Rate

Government initiated awareness programs regarding benefits of blockchain technology among undeveloped nations is anticipated to fuel the demand in the global blockchain technology market“, said a lead analyst at Fortune Business Insights.

Increasing adoption of e-financial services and rapid adoption of the blockchain technology in developed nations are expected to drive the global blockchain technology market during the forecast period.

Increasing number of new blockchain products and their approval grants is also anticipated to act as a driving factor for the global Blockchain technology market.

Partnerships Among Key Market Players and Blockchain Developers Driving the Market in North America

North America emerged dominant in the global blockchain technology market in 2017. The North America market was worth US$ 820 Mn in 2017. The region will continue leading the market at a global level through the forecast period. Growth witnessed in the market is also attributable to recent collaborations between market players in the U.S. and blockchain service provides. Europe is also anticipated to witness impressive growth during the forecast period owing to high presence of blockchain technology developers.

In 2017, IBM was the leading organization in the global Blockchain technology market. Other companies operating in the global market are Oracle Corporation, Deloitte, Microsoft Corporation, IBM Corporation, The Linux Foundation, Chain Inc., Consensus Systems, Bits, Inc (Tendermint, Inc.), Schvey, Inc. (Axoni), VironIT, Altoros, and Fintech & Blockchain Software House.

Source: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/blockchain-technology-market-100072

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Satoshi

Microsoft Blockchain Project for tracking products

A technology originally created for NASA communication now will be used by the new Microsoft blockchain project that will help tracking products worldwide.

Microsoft Blockchain’s Project called Manifest can also help to ensure the origin of the material used and the labor used to build the products, conforming them to company’s standards.

Thanks to a partnership with Mojix, Project Manifest uses Internet of Things (IoT) platform that is currently integrated with the Ethereum blockchain to help companies to track items using a radio frequency identification device (RFID).

This kind of implementation is able to inform each member of the supply chain about the history of a shipped product.

During a recent interview with Microsoft’s strategist Yorke Rhodes, he explained why this partnership was chosen:

“Project Manifest is actually designed to look at the challenges of visibility in the supply chain. One of the reasons why we worked with Mojix is because they already have technology and know-how in supply chains for scanning RFIDs.”

A new database to track products

An early version of the Microsoft blockchain solution now integrates Mojix’s platform, called ViZix, with a smart contracts and it was exhibited during an event held last week at the National Retail Federation in NYC.

The ViZix integration has been designed to exploit the rapidly growing rate that goods are being labelled with RFID, Bluetooth and GPS sensors.

 

 

“The consumer would like to be able to see where the goods are to make sure they’re not coming from slave labor and things like that,” said Yorke. “By way of giving consumers the ability to do that we’d like to push certain parts of the data to a public blockchain.”

Microsoft Blockchain creates new partnerships

In addition to the Mojix partnership, Project Manifest also includes work with a standards body and support from the academic sector.

In fact, Project Manifest confirmed that two professors and 10 students from Auburn University’s RFID lab will also participate to the group.

Also, the lab has been engaged with seven brands and three retailers for seeking to create new ways to deal with a recent growth in supply chain data.

This team is studying and testing electronic proof of delivery, vendor scorecarding, anti-counterfeiting, anti-grey market, and data exchange data.

And a report about these researches is expected by the end of 2017.

Read more about Microsoft Blockchain’s project here.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio

Bitcoin Excel Support among Microsoft projects

Microsoft officially announced its plans to add a Bitcoin Excel support in the upcoming release of its new version of Excel 2017,

This Bitcoin Excel Support will allow users to calculate, format and analyze bitcoin on the program.

Account executive at Microsoft, Martin Butler posted on Twitter:

“In 2017, Excel will be able to recognize, format, calculate and analyze numbers expressed in Bitcoin currency. The new feature will be available for Excel running under Windows 10, Android, Mac OS and iOS, and will include Excel Mobile versions as well.”

Bitcoin expert Alistair Milne first expressed his enthusiasm for the Bitcoin integration. and also the whole Bitcoin community reacted positively for this the company’s effort as it can help a massive adoption for Bitcoin.

“Bitcoin is a currency” for Bitcoin Excel Support

During the past few years, a few government agencies and financial institutions avoided the word “currency” in describing Bitcoin.

The official recognition of Bitcoin worldwide by tax authorities is still a minefield, even if Russia recently declared its decision to recognize Bitcoin as a foreign value.

By the end of 2016, investors and traders were considering Bitcoin as a worldwide currency and the only safe haven asset for its capacity and ability to prevent financial issues and economic problems.

Bitcoin has been crucial in protecting the wealth of most households and businesses in the past 12 months. Maybe it is for this reason that Microsoft coined Bitcoin as a currency for its global users who utilize Microsoft Execel every day.

Microsoft loves cryptocurrencies

Microsoft is heavily involved in the development and deployment of various Blockchain-based platforms, including Azure Blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, where businesses can use the distributed ledger to simplify the settlement of financial data.

The company also supported meetups about Ethereum and other blockchain-related companies, demonstrating their love for the cryptocurrencies industry development.

To read more about Microsoft and Bitcoin, click here.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio

Microsoft Smart Contracts: a working group to improve security

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Today the tech giant announced it is working on a project to improve Microsoft smart contracts security.
Called Kinakuta, this working group aims at making it easier for companies to use and develop smart contracts based on the blockchain.
Even if more and more businesses are increasingly expressing interest in blockchain based smart contracts, concerns about this kind of use case grew after the DAO collapse.
Since then, Microsoft decided to improve smart contracts security to avoid further issues in the future.
Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of business development and strategy, in fact, believes that their project could reduce future risks.
“We feel there’s a huge opportunity here to involve the community. Kinakuta is the community building around Microsoft best practices and elsewhere, to collect best practices and tools and involve developers in creating these best practices.”
Gray explained that there are 35 developers and companies that the company decided to call for the Microsoft Smart Contracts group. These include the Ethereum Foundation, R3CEV and BlockApps.

Vitalik Buterin on Microsoft Smart Contracts

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Creator, commented that he doesn’t believe that this new project could necessarily stop future collapses like DAO.
“There will be further bugs and we will learn further lessons,” he explained in a blog post.

Microsoft Smart Contracts: a whitepaper with Harvard

Previously, Microsoft released a research realized with Harvard that explained how ethereum smart contracts will work.
This whitepaper proposes a method called “formal verification”, or the way to prove the correctness of a smart contract; also it proposes two tools to help verify smart contracts: Solidity and EVM.

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Satoshi

Microsoft BaaS to help Blockchain developers

microsoft_baas
Microsoft BaaS is available for all users of the Azure testing environment. Microsoft, in fact, started to test the blockchain back in 2014 and now it is developing its Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).
Created to allow developers to easily create environments thanks to Azure, DevTest Labs wants to allow companies to limit expenses made for developing their own applications.
Also, the project provides editable templates, so developers don’t have to design new environments; BaaS will also provide artifacts with the objective of telling apps what actions to take after developed.
The project supports more than 20 blockchains, including MultiChain, Eris, Storj and Augur; and it aims at improving developers work for creating and testing distributed ledger with less money.
Microsoft’s Marley Gray commented:
“With the Azure DevTest Labs integration, Microsoft has made it even easier for developers to get blockchain lab environments up-and-running.”
Also, by using the Azure DevTest Labs, developers can doing experiments with private, permissioned, public or consortium blockchains, as Microsoft wants to include every single blockchain to its platform.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Satoshi
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Microsoft to launch an identity platform through the blockchain

The well-known tech giant Microsoft recently started a partnership with Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys to create an open-source platform to integrate both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.
In today’s blog post published by Microsoft blockchain business strategist Yorke Rhodes III, in fact, he explained that the company will create an open source framework on Azure, where developers can build their own identity applications.
“Microsoft is collaborating with partners Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys, and developers across the globe on an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows people, products, apps, and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers, and organizations. Our goal in contributing to this initiative is to start a conversation on blockchain-based identity that could improve apps, services, and more importantly, the lives of real people worldwide by enabling self-owned or self-sovereign identity”.
The possibility to connect this platform to both the Ethereum and the Bitcoin blockchain will take place thanks to Blockstack and uPort systems.
This partnership started during the ID2020 Summit held in New York a few weeks ago.
According to Rhodes, a first version of this framework will be launched within the end of the summer on the Azure platform. 

Identity Problem in the Digital World

identity platform blockchain
According to the post published by Rhodes, 1.5 billion people don’t have a proper identification.
And this makes it difficult for them to have a bank account or access to education and more services.
  • 1.5B people are without proper identification, that’s one-fifth of the world’s population.
  • One in three children under the age of five does not officially exist because their birth has not been recorded.
  • Cumulatively, 230M children under the age of five have no birth certificate; this number is growing.
  • 50M children are born without legal identity, the size of the UK, each year.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio

Red Hat to help blockchain related startups

Yesterday Red Hat announced its idea to start its OpenShift blockchain that aims at helping financial companies with their initiatives related to the disruptive distributed ledger.
Thanks to OpenShift, Red Hat users can create blockchain applications using tools provided by indipendent sellers and with the support of Red Hat’s Openshift Dedicated program.

How Openshift works 

OpenShift Dedicated wants to help the startups related to blockchaintech, fintech ISVs, and traditional financial companies to begin their blockchain-based projects.
“A lot of folks in the market are looking to deploy on the big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. There are many companies offering cloud support”, Tapia commented.
Tapia clarified that OpenShift Dedicated is available on Amazon and will soon be available on Google and Microsoft Azure as well.
During a recent interview, director of OpenShift, Julio Tapia, explained that the company wants to use its own experience in the open source sector related to blockchain technology.
These were his words:
“We want to position ourselves with not only customers and partners, but leverage solutions developed in the entire ecosystem, taking all the innovation going on in the industry, maturing it for an enterprise market and making sure all the solutions can be launched and supported.”

Red Hat with Hyperledger

Previously, in February, Red Hat announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, “an open source platform to advance the blockchain digital technology for recording and verifying transactions”, according to the press release.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
Immagine 2

Ethereum is bigger than ever

During the past months cryptocurrency Ethereum was growing fast, increasing its value and consequently its own popularity.
Today the Ethereum price is about $9 (0.022 BTC) and it undergone very few changes with an almost always upward price.
Just in the last day Ethereum raised its market capitalization by 26%, reaching almost $730 million, representing more than 10% of Bitcoin’s market cap.
This behaviour is truly important as Ethereum is proving to be much louder than the other altcoins, reaching the market capitalization of all the other altcoinsll together, excluding bitcoin.

Microsoft Corporation certified Ethereum

Some days ago a startup who provides Ethereum softwares, BlockApps became the first certified company on Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).
Director of Blockchain strategy at Microsoft Corporation, Marley Gray, commented:
“The simple, rapid and flexible one-click deploy of Ethereum blockchain architecture launched on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace enables enterprises and developers to quickly deploy a certified blockchain environment on Azure.”

But, what is Ethereum?

Created in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency and a blockchain platform who provides decentralized services.
  At the moment Ethereum is in the so-called Homestead phase, the second of the six phases of its rollout that they company planned. The other phases will be “Metropolis (Mist release), Serenity (proof of stake Casper plus abstraction, aka Ethereum 1.5), Ethereum 2.0 and Ethereum 3.0 that will focus on scalability”, commented Buterin during a recent interview conducted by Bitcoin.com.
Thanks to Homestead, said Buterin, “the risk of using the Ethereum platform is now substantially reduced”.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio

Microsoft Opens to Bitcoin

Since the end of 2014 Microsoft Corporation has started to test the blockchain technology.

In fact, Microsoft wants to create its own blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) product and since they have opened their Azure cloud computing platform, the American company has added a growing number of partners to its BaaS solution including ConsenSys, Emercoin and MultiChain.
With Azure and BaaS people will be able to use different technologies (from smart contracts to blockchain-based tax reporting services) in a safer and easier way than in the past.
We can’t wait to see the finished product and Marley Gray, Microsoft‘s director of technology strategy, promises that this “certified blockchain marketplace” will be ready within this spring.
The Importance of the Blockchain
Although blockchain is revolutioning the whole payments system, the real revolution are the bitcoins behind it.
The Blockchain is a secure ledger that records and stores every transaction in the network. Thanks to that there is no need for “trusted” third parties such as banks and this is why the Blockchain is a great game changer.
Its implications extend not only to bitcoin transactions, but it can be useful in various fields: from real estate to copyrights, from music to cinema, etc. In fact nowadays there is an increasing number of new startups that are working on innovative projects based on the blockchain with multipurpose uses and aims.
And one thing is certain: if anything was not invented yet, it is just temporary, because the blockchain allows all kinds of experimentation.

About the author: Amelia Tomasicchio is a writer and a journalist of Bitcoin-related news and articles. She started writing about Bitcoin in 2014 and she graduated in Rome with an essay about movie industry related to Bitcoin.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio