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Microsoft Unveils Enterprise-Grade Crypto Token Minting Platform
Microsoft wants to make creating blockchain tokens in the cloud as easy as plugging in a printer.
So says Marley Gray, principal architect at Microsoft, after Monday’s announcement of the Azure Blockchain Tokens platform.
Just as printers were once difficult to set up – with a hodgepodge of printer types and their device-specific drivers – Gray says enterprise-oriented crypto tokens currently suffer from the same pitfalls.
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“You can go buy a printer or any kind of device 1717411208 and you just plug it in and it works,” Gray told CoinDesk. “The same analogy applies here for tokens and that’s what we’re building in Azure.”
Announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, the platform allows companies to choose from a growing set of token creation models compliant with the Token Taxonomy Initiative (TTI), a business and standards-building consortium led by Gray.
So far, numerous TTI compliant tokens have been created for uses such as loyalty rewards or incentivize software teams to achieve stated goalsas well as traditional financial instruments such as letters of credit in trade financing.
TTI has already gone further than other ventures in bringing different and competing blockchain factions – from IBM to R3 to Ethereum variants – under one roof.
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“We are creating a platform in the cloud where any token within the TTI framework can snap into place,” Gray said. “So you can create applications where you want to use tokens with, for example, Dynamics, SAP, applications in [Microsoft] Office suite or some other business automation process.”
Token taxonomy
The Azure Blockchain Tokens Platform is released along with a set of sample tokens.
They range from a Hyperledger Fabric FabToken created by IBM to Santander’s BOND token to a REWARD token from Intel and ConsenSys and many others.
A spokesperson for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), where Gray originated the token taxonomy, said that while these examples are not yet in commercial production, all specifications are available for download. A tech team can basically say, “I want one of these,” the spokesperson said.
Gray, who is also president of TTI, was keen to emphasize that Azure Blockchain tokens are not just “a Microsoft thing.”
“It absolutely isn’t,” he said. “This includes IBM, R3, Digital Asset. We are partners with all of them.”
But how does interoperability work between the giants of Web 2.0?
While it may be intuitive for IBM Blockchain Platform, for example, to run on IBM Cloud, it can they work just as well on AWS or Azure. Along the same lines, Gray said there should be “portability” of these types of tokens across clouds and networks, depending on the infrastructure people need.
He concluded:
“The industry has suffered from the conflict between IBM and Microsoft, between Hyperledger and Ethereum and so on. We are trying to break down these barriers.”
Microsoft image via Shutterstock