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Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises that want to adopt this technology for smart contracts and other use cases. For them, issues like throughput, latency, governance and confidentiality are still major stumbling blocks for using blockchains. With its new Coco Framework<\/a>, Microsoft wants to solve these issues and make blockchains more suitable for the enterprise.<\/p>\n In an interview earlier this week, Microsoft\u2019s CTO for Azure (and occasional novelist<\/a>) Mark Russinovich told me the company is seeing a lot of interest in blockchain technology among its users. They like the general idea of a distributed ledger, but a system that can only handle a handful of transactions a second doesn\u2019t work for them \u2014 what they want is a technology that can handle a thousand or more transactions per second.<\/p>\n The Coco Framework solves these fundamental issues with blockchains by introducing a trusted execution environment (TEE). The basic idea here is that you have a trusted box on which you can trust to put your blockchain code. That trust is established through tools like Intel\u2019s Software Guard Extensions or Windows\u2019 Virtual Secure Mode \u2014 and because it\u2019s an open framework, it can also support other TEEs as they become available. With these TEEs you can then build a network of trusted enclaves that all agree on the ledger and Coco code they are running (it\u2019s a concept Intel and others have also experimented with in the past<\/a>).<\/p>\n Once you have these trusted enclaves, all the other pieces fall into place. Because you can trust the updates to the ledger, you don\u2019t need to perform any proof of work, which greatly increases the transaction speed.\u00a0In a typical ledger, that would take seconds or even minutes. But with the enclaves, that\u2019s not an issue, and Microsoft says Coco and Ethereum can handle up to 1,600 transactions per second in its prototype setup. Thanks to this, the blockchain network \u2014 when combined with a protocol like Paxos<\/a> for ensuring consistency \u2014 becomes a usable database.<\/p>\n Enterprises also want to ensure that one of their suppliers can\u2019t see the orders you placed with another supplier. That\u2019s a hard problem to solve when your ledger is public. Coco, however, adds a confidentiality layer on top of a ledger like Ethereum (or any other ledger, because the framework is ledger-agnostic). Enabling this only took some minor addition to the Ethereum protocol in Microsoft\u2019s prototype.<\/p>\n Another feature Coco enables is governance. To explain this, Russinovich used the example of a bank consortium that wants to use a blockchain network. Who gets to add another bank to this network? The Coco governance system allows the members of the consortium to set up rules for voting on decisions like this.<\/p>\n What\u2019s important here is that the Coco Framework will be compatible with any ledger protocol and can run virtually anywhere \u2014 in the cloud or on premises, and on any operating system and hypervisor that supports a compatible trusted environment. R3 Corda<\/a>, Intel\u2019s Hyperledger Sawtooth<\/a> and J.P. Morgan Quorum<\/a> will integrate their distributed ledgers Coco.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are thrilled to work with Microsoft to bring blockchain to the enterprise,\u201d said Rick Echevarria, vice president, Software and Services Group and General Manager, Platforms Security Division at Intel, in today\u2019s announcement. \u201cOur mutual customers are excited by the potential of blockchain. Intel is committed to accelerating the value of blockchains powered by Azure on Intel hardware, by improving the scalability, privacy and security of the solutions based on our technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get too excited yet, though. It\u2019ll be early 2018 before Microsoft will open source the code for Coco. Russinovich tells me the team is still hardening the code and getting it ready for open sourcing. The company is making a technical whitepaper and demonstrations available today, though.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Bryce Durbin<\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/2MHKPpINLQ8\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises that want to adopt this technology for smart contracts <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-8066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t