If Microsoft Azure's
CTO is right, R3CEV may have just been the beginning.
Mark Russinovich
envisions a world where every industry is involved in a blockchain
consortium. In fact, since the network effect of a blockchain is only
amplified by the number of participants, he thinks this future will prove
inevitable as companies seek efficiency in numbers.
And there's evidence
so far to suggest that Russinovich is right.
Since blockchain industry groups first began to pop up last year with the formation of financial consortium R3CEV, the rate those efforts being announced has only increased. To
meet the growing demand, Microsoft went so far as to launch Project Bletchley,
an effort designed to make it easier to establish consortia.
Whereas Microsoft's Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) suite of
tools will remain open to all protocols, consensus algorithms and
databases, Bletchley was built from the ground up to help companies in the same
industry take advantage of their similarities, even while they compete against
each other.
Instead of wondering
where the next consortium might emerge, Russinovich argues we need look no
further than the existing consortia seeing to the needs of various industries.
Where they exist, he said, intermediaries exist, just waiting to be made more
efficient by blockchain or cut out of the picture entirely.
Russinovich said
of financial firms so far interested in the idea:
"If they’re going to
get disrupted, they want to do it to themselves and then take advantage of the
disruption."
Disrupting consortia
Typically, a consortium is owned and operated by competitors within an
industry as a way to create shared standards, unify supply chains and self-regulate so
as to return profits to the industry as a whole, according to the Ecommerce Digest definition.
Examples that demonstrate the diversity of such vertically connected
organizations include the British
Retail Consortium, connecting the region's retail outlets and
related businesses; theAdditive Manufacturing
Consortium, based in Columbus, Ohio, and run by EWI Associates; and
the newly formed IoT in Healthcare Consortium,
a not-for-profit, subsidiary organization of The Intelligent Health
Association.
Though Russinovich
couldn't go into details about which specific consortia Microsoft is meeting
with, he said that the company is seeing "huge interest" across
sectors, including retail, manufacturing, financial and healthcare. "We're
seeing it all," he said.
To accelerate the
formation of related blockchain consortia, Bletchley offers a framework of
distributed ledger modules with different functionality derived from requests
of previous customers. Instead of building from scratch, the companies can form
consortia and share what they've learned.
Russinovich calls it
best-practices-as-a-service for blockchain.
He said:
"This is part of the
vision for Bletchley, vertical solutions that are focused on what we've learned
with our partners where these pieces of technology fit together to solve a
problem that other people in organizations in the same industry, with the same
scenarios, could take advantage of really quickly."
Securing the consortia
But building a
consortia to share skill-sets and make supply chains more efficient is only as
valuable as it is secure.
Currently, Microsoft
has two endeavors aimed at tightening up security around two crucial areas: the
smart contracts that run on consortia blockchains, and the edges of blockchains
where third-party data is given entrance.
During the original Bletchley launch, Microsoft unveiled a new form of
middleware called 'cryptlets'
designed to serve as gateways that allow trusted data to interact with a
blockchain.
Cryptlets are code that can be executed in a verifiable way — the
blockchain calls out to a cryptlet that can then "inject" into the
distributed ledger real-world data such as the price of a commodity from
verified sources. In a Microsoft white
paper the company describes cryptlets as the
"fabric" used to construct a blockchain enterprise consortium.
Whereas cryptlets are
focused on making sure the edges of a blockchain are secure, Kinakuta aims to
make what happens on the blockchain less susceptible to bugs.
Unveiled last week, Kinakuta is an early-stage working group where industry leaders have been invited to help make smart contracts
more secure. If industry consortia are ever to form, the success of efforts
like this are crucial.
As was made clear by the collapse of The DAO smart contract earlier
this year, vulnerabilities in these programs can have wide-spread
ripple-effects if enough people agree to the terms.
To make such bug less
likely, Microsoft's director of business development and strategy, Marley Gray,
told CoinDesk that Kinakuta employs a custom coding language designed to
minimize human error.
Gray told CoinDesk:
"It will be closely
linked into the Bletchley Project. A huge part of Bletchley is making
blockchain secure."
Building on the past
By creating a
framework with which consortia members can connect and enabling safe ways for
consortia members to port-in their own data and data from trusted third-parties,
Russinovich believes Microsoft has laid the foundation for an explosion of
blockchain industry groups.
Microsoft first
entered the blockchain industry in late 2014 when it rolled out its inaugural
partnership with bitcoin payments provider BitPay. One year later, it would
launch a new Blockchain-as-a-Service toolkit hosted on its Azure cloud
development platform.
Since then, Microsoft has added over a dozen third-party "tools"
to the platform, including most recently, a services created by cryptocurrency projects Monero
and Tendermint.
As part of Microsoft's move to lay the foundation for wide-spread
consortia, the companyannounced Bletchley in June, followed earlier this month by the opening up of access to its Blockchain-as-a-Service offering to all users of the Azure
testing environment.
Currently, Microsoft
is working on cryptographic tools designed to give future consortia members
increased privacy while still leveraging the reliability of a shared ledger.
According to Russinovich, his goal is that within the next three years
consortia building with Microsoft’s tools will be operating on a larger scale
with fewer middlemen.
Russinovich concluded:
"I think we’ll see
blockchain in production in scenarios internal to companies, in consortia that
are participants working together across a variety of sectors where we’re going
to see some real-world usage of it."
Image via Michael del Castillo for CoinDesk
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