Microsoft has partnered with JP Morgan Chase to boost the financial giant’s Quorum blockchain technology. Quorum, which is available through Microsoft’s Azure computing service, is JP Morgan’s enterprise version of Ethereum, and is designed to power interbank payments.
The partnership makes JP Morgan the first distributed ledger platform available through Azure Blockchain Service.
It will give Microsoft and JP Morgan customers the ability to deploy and manage scalable blockchain networks in the cloud.
“Together, the platform will enable enterprise businesses across all industries to shift their focus from infrastructure management to application development, ultimately driving transformative business value.
Customers will be able to rapidly grow their networks while benefitting from lower costs, simplified deployment and built-in governance enabled through Azure Blockchain Service.”
Back in October, the company revealed Quorum will be used to essentially tokenize gold bars on the Ethereum network. According to JP Morgan’s New York-based head of blockchain initiatives, Umar Farooq,
“There are people outside our firm using Quorum to tokenize gold, for instance.
They wrap a gold bar into a tamper-proof case electronically tagged, and they can track the gold bar from the mine to end point – with the use case being, if you know it’s a socially responsible mine, someone will be willing to pay a higher spread on that gold versus if you don’t know where it comes from. Diamonds is another example.”
Back in February, JP Morgan announced that it’s creating its own stablecoin, JPM Coin, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. The token will reportedly be used to power real-time transactions between clients of its wholesale payments business.
Microsoft’s latest partnership with JP Morgan Chase expands the working relationship between the tech giant and the largest bank in the US, as JP Morgan faces the emergence of cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based banking networks such as Ripple and massive social networks, such as Facebook, that are gearing up to offer financial services by deploying blockchain technology and digital assets.
In addition to providing a platform for Quorum customers to build blockchain networks and applications, Quorum will continue to power JP Morgan and Microsoft blockchain programs. These include first-party apps, such as the Interbank Information Network, JPM Coin and Microsoft’s Xbox royalty payment process.
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