Azure's Blockchain as a Service continues to grow at a very rapid pace. In order to consolidate all of the various partner offerings and make them more easily discoverable for the most common uses, there are now going to be three main places where these assets can be found.
DevTest labs continues to be a very active place to explore the power of blockchain networks. Azure DevTest labs allows you to create a lab “sandbox” to invite your partners, competitors and supply chain participants into where they can be contributors having full control over resources they create, but no administrative permissions to others resources. It creates the perfect environment to try out collaborative use cases for blockchains in a move towards a shared ecommerce platform based on distributed ledgers. This allows you to create your own “private” consortium lab within your Azure subscription, setting up restrictions for usage, etc., but skip the whole “joint” lab setup and get to work ASAP.
The DevTest Labs Artifact library has a new home. The old location will remain, but will not be updated. If you manually added the old library to your DevTest Lab, please redirect the URL for the artifact library the new URL.
To make it REALLY easy to get started with your own “consortium” lab, we have created a Blockchain as a Service Marketplace Template. The template will automatically setup your lab with the most popular lab settings and include the library of existing Blockchain as a Service partner offerings. The library of blockchain artifacts is kept up to date, so you will know when new distributed ledger platforms, tools and services become available.
New partners!
This week Microsoft welcomes: Algorythmix, Expanse, Influx, Monero, Radium and Tendermint.
Algorythmix
Cetas: Decentralized KYC and Credit Rating services
Cetas aims to provide identity and reputation services across multiple organizations, using the power of the collaborative economy. Cetas allows sharing of complex identity and reputation system processes like KYC/AML with credit rating across various cross industry organizations. Cetas maintains an apt balance between AML and Privacy laws by empowering regulators with oversight, users with consent and banking institutions with verification rights. This robust identity platform enables a next generation P2P credit rating platform where the credit score of an entity can be generated based on behavior across the new collaborative economy.
Integration with Microsoft Azure can provide users and organizations a KYC/AML/Credit service for distributed ledgers and their applications. For developers, Certas provides a platform to build extended services with additional KYC/AML functionality for their industry. Algorythmix is releasing a beta version of Cetas on Microsoft BaaS expected to be delivered in the coming months.
Expanse
Expanse is a community-based, decentralized information, application, and smart contract platform. The Expanse project is operated by its community through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) in which its members directly collaborate; exchange thoughts and ideas; and vote to determine the project's future developments and management decisions. Featuring a growing collection of smart contracts, dApps and toolkits provide users and organizations of all types with intuitive access to some of the most exciting applications of blockchain technology.
The project provides tools and services that businesses, charities, and even governments can use to easily and intuitively make use of blockchain technology from creating and managing smart assets to providing digital fulfillment and distribution. Expanse is excited to be working with Microsoft to provide powerful solutions, leveraging the services of Azure with the power of the Expanse blockchain.” Check out the video below to learn or try it here.
Influx
Influx is a X11 algorithm based coin with no pre-mine using a Pow+Pos Hybrid backend and designed specifically for CPU/GPU setups. Originally planned as just a Novelty coin to teach youngsters about Cryptocurrency, it quickly has evolved into something much more. We have a passion for helping people with their computer needs and truly love being able to interact with the world. We are now working to obtain partnerships to use (INFX) for web services such as web hosting and other payment solutions pertaining to the vast web space.
Try it out here.
Monero
Monero is a crypto currency that is not based on the Bitcoin codebase, and that aims to remain as private, secure, and scalable as possible. All Monero transactions are cryptographically untraceable and unlinkable, and there is no separate “clear” token. This enables end users to use Monero as a private store of value and as a medium of exchange that is impervious to blockchain analysis or miner censorship.
Developers that are building privacy-aware or privacy-centric applications will benefit from Monero's private-by-default approach, and will appreciate the small and simple metadata storage area (tx_extra) available in every transaction. Additionally, they will benefit from the standard and uncomplicated cryptography based on Daniel J. Bernstein's Curve25519 EC curve as well as EdDSA signatures.
Those building pegged off-chain or sidechain systems needn't worry about on-chain limitations, as Monero's dynamic block size algorithm grows and shrinks the block size limit based on the on-chain demand. Peg as much back to the Monero blockchain as you need!
Lastly, for those that are interested in the academic and research side of things, the Monero Research Lab have published several research bulletins and tools, which are available on the Research Lab site on the Research Lab's GitHub repo.
Learn more on the official Monero Forum or try it out here.
Radium
Radium is a Proof-Of-Stake Cryptocurrency that serves as the base blockchain for the Radium SmartChain. The goal of Radium and the SmartChain is to provide a unique platform for development of decentralized blockchain services without centralized servers. The quickly growing list includes Username-Address linkage, Proof-Of-Existence, Proof-Of-Ownership, and Proof-Of-File Origin. The advanced Radium functions are embedded in the Radium block chain and accessed through the SmartChain RPC Client. File origin can be verified through the SmartChain OneClickVerify system, or online through the SmartChain verify website.
Tendermint
Tendermint brings simplicity, security, and speed to the world's blockchains.
- Simplicity: Program your blockchain applications (i.e. smart contracts) in any programming language; focus on business logic.
- Security: State-of-the-art accountable BFT consensus algorithm; Tendermint uses digital signatures and quorums instead of electricity and mining.
- Speed: Sub-second blocktimes and 10,000 transactions-per-second; commit and settle transactions instantly on a fork-free chain.
Tendermint is developing a new modular architecture for blockchain development, with an open-source blockchain engine at the core that can power any ledger application; whether it be based on Bitcoin’s UTXO, the Ethereum virtual machine, or entirely novel designs.
Try it out for DevTest Labs here.
Last, but not least, we welcome Manifold's BaaS offering that installs the Manifold Platform Blockchain as a Service Endpoint on a CentOS VM.
Try it out here.
That's it for this week, looking forward to great things ahead!