Microsoft has introduced an Ethereum-based blockchain protocol called Confidential Consortium Framework (Coco). It opens up the possibility for enterprises and authorities to build up even larger company networks on the basis of decentralized registers, the so-called blockchains.
"Coco provides an alternative approach to the organization of data structures," said Mark Russinovich, Technical Director of Microsoft Azure. This is the cloud computing department of the US company with a market value of 561 billion dollars.
With the Confidential Consortium Framework (CoCo), Microsoft is giving companies the scalability they need without sacrificing the expected security and unalterability, says Mark Russinovich.
In the first live demonstration last week, CoCo reached 1,700 transactions per second on a private version of the Ethereum blockchain. The average volume is about 1,600 transactions per second. For most business applications this is clearly more than sufficient.
The new protocol provides a governance model that allows legitimate members of a company to vote on all possible variables and conditions of a network. This allows new members to be added or removed.
An advantage of the Coco Framework is that it makes local hardware-based environments, such as Intel's Trusted Execution Environment (TEEs), available for processing and securing information outside the Ethereum block.
The freely available protocol runs not only with the cloud offer of Microsoft Azure, but can be used according to Microsoft on each platform or directly on site. CoCo is part of Microsoft's strategy to provide advanced services to companies that want to bring sophisticated products to the market through the use of blockchain technology.
With the processing of data outside of the Ethereum Blockchain, Microsoft provides a critical infrastructure for decentralized applications. With the help of these off-chain infrastructures, Ethereum could enable companies to process even larger amounts of data, says Cointelegraph Fred Ehrsam, a co-founder of the US Bitcoin exchange Coinbase.
In his view, Ethereum needs progress in scalability by a factor of 100. Only so it was possible to run distributed applications with one to ten million users efficiently. "Large applications can not only run on the blockchain, and probably will not. For scaling, they need solutions outside the chain, "says Fred Ehrsam.
The Coco Framework from Microsoft and other similar off-chain platforms will significantly increase the scalability of Ethereum. They will allow distributed applications to process larger amounts of data, without having to give in return for security.
These efforts also include the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance , a group of some of the largest American technology companies, but also of financial companies such as JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, Mastercard, UBS and ING. A goal of Microsoft may also be to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) with blockchain solutions.
During a panel discussion during the presentation of CoCo in the last week also the boss of the blockchain program of JPMorgan, Amberbaldet. Your company wants to use the CoCo framework from Microsoft to provide companies with an "additional level of security and performance", she quotes Coindesk .
Intel's vice-chancellor, Rick Echevarria, explained his company's participation in the CoCo initiative with a broad application. "We eliminate a lot of barriers, in terms of scalability, privacy, and security. Companies that build blockchain technologies can now focus on what adds value to their business. "