Blockchain
Develop, test, and deploy secure blockchain apps
Get started with Azure Blockchain WorkbenchWhat is a blockchain?
Blockchain is a transparent and verifiable system that will change the way people think about exchanging value and assets, enforcing contracts, and sharing data. The technology is a shared, secure ledger of transactions distributed among a network of computers, rather than resting with a single provider. Businesses are using blockchain as a common data layer to enable a new class of applications. Now, business processes and data can be shared across multiple organizations, which eliminates waste, reduces the risk of fraud, and creates new revenue streams.
How Blockchain will Accelerate Business Performance and Power the Smart Economy
“When fully automated, blockchain can enforce consistency in execution, assist with dispute resolution, increase accountability, and deliver end-to-end transparency that can inform better business decisions.”
Read moreWhat are businesses doing with blockchain?
Find out how blockchain is transforming the financial services industry
Explore how blockchain is being applied across the banking, capital markets, and insurance industries. See how blockchain helps financial services institutions eliminate intermediaries, collaborate more efficiently, and create disruptive new business models.
Discover how blockchain can create smarter, more efficient supply chains
Read about how blockchain helps resolve disputes quickly and transparently. Discover how blockchain adds visibility to the corporate supply chain by keeping a single, real-time view that’s consistent for everyone.
Why use blockchain on Azure?
Simplify development
Cut development time and experiment easily with modular, preconfigured networks and infrastructure.
Get up and running quickly
Iterate and validate blockchain scenarios quickly by using built-in connections to Azure and tools you’re already familiar with.
Innovate with confidence
Keep your data secure and scale when you need to—on an open, trusted, globally available cloud platform.
Customers are doing great things with blockchain on Azure
Ground-breaking insurance blockchain solution runs in Microsoft Azure
Insurwave
"We anticipate that the efficiencies delivered by Insurwave will reduce the cost of marine insurance premiums by 10 to 20 percent."
Webjet uses Azure to power Rezchain, a payment reconciliation service for the online travel market
"We've found that almost 90 percent of mismatched hotel bookings can be resolved without cost when we use blockchain to tackle them at or near the time of booking."
Microsoft uses blockchain to deliver royalty statements to Xbox game publishers faster with significant efforts reduction
"The need for a blockchain solution like ours is not unique to Microsoft and game publishers. It applies to any industry where organizations have to reconcile royalty payments."
Solution architectures
Supply Chain Track and Trace
A common blockchain pattern is IoT-enabled monitoring of an asset as it moves along a multi-party supply chain. A great example of this pattern is the refrigerated transportation of perishable goods like food or pharmaceuticals where certain compliance rules must be met throughout the duration of the transportation process. In this scenario, an initiating counterparty (such as a retailer) specifies contractual conditions, such as a required humidity and temperature range, that the custodians on the supply chain must adhere to. At any point, if the device takes a temperature or humidity measurement that is out of range, the smart contract state will be updated to indicate that it's out of compliance, recording a transaction on the blockchain and triggering remediating events downstream.
- 1 IoT devices send telemetry records or events to a message broker (Service Bus).
- 2 DLT Consumer fetches the data from the message broker (Service Bus) and sends data to Transaction Builder.
- 3 Transaction Builder builds and signs the transaction.
- 4 The signed transaction gets routed to the Blockchain (Private Ethereum Consortium Network).
- 5 DLT Watcher gets confirmation of the transaction commitment to the Blockchain and sends the confirmation to the message broker (Service Bus).
- 6 DB consumers send confirmed blockchain transactions to off-chain databases (Azure SQL Database).
- 7 Information analyzed and visualized using tools such as Power BI by connecting to off-chain database (Azure SQL Database).
- 8 Business process integration (such as events or CRM) with message broker for downstream consumers (Event Grid).
Jumpstart your blockchain project on Azure
Build with the ledger that suits your use case
Build your own blockchain applications with help from our trusted partners
Get the latest news from the Azure blog
Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure
We’ve had great traction with our support of Ethereum on Azure. The existing Proof-of-Work solution has been deployed tens of thousands of times across a variety of industry verticals.
Improve collaborative care and clinical data sharing with blockchain
Currently, the healthcare industry suffers major inefficiencies due to diverse uncoordinated and unconnected data sources/systems. Collaboration is vital to improve healthcare outcomes. With digitized health data, the exchange of healthcare information across healthcare organizations is essential to support effective care collaboration. Traditional health information exchanges have had limited success.
Blockchain as a tool for anti-fraud
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In 2016, healthcare costs in the US are estimated at nearly 18 percent of the GDP! Healthcare is becoming less affordable worldwide, and a serious chasm is widening between those that can afford healthcare and those that cannot. There are many factors driving the high cost of healthcare, one of them is fraud.
Related solutions
Internet of Things
Power your digital transformation, collect untapped data, and find new insights by connecting your devices, assets, and sensors
Big data and analytics
Make the most informed decision possible by analyzing all of the data you need in real time
Serverless computing
Build apps faster, focusing on innovation instead of infrastructure management
LOB applications
Modernize your internal line of business (LOB) apps to meet today’s IT challenges