Although Blockchain technology has attracted the interest of large enterprises, its development across the financial sector has largely remained indifferent. Microsoft wants to shed this reticence through the release of its Coco Framework, a new open-source foundation for enterprise blockchain networks.
Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks
Coco stands for Confidential Consortium. It is designed for permissioned networks (as opposed to public networks). The network constitution in Coco contains a list, arrived at by a vote of consortium members, of all of the actors permitted to interact with the network. With this mechanism in place, nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled so that Coco readily implements network-level authentication to restrict access to participants. Beyond network-level authentication, there is also ledger and DApp level authentication. The ledger exposes capabilities that natively secure the data in the ledger.
Blockchain is a transformational technology with the potential to extend digital transformation beyond a company’s four walls and into the processes it shares with suppliers, customers, and partners. Today I am proud to introduce the Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology, wrote Mark Russinovich CTO, Microsoft Azure in a blog post.
In addition to the above, the framework introduces a construct called a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Through it, each node controls the encrypted data coming in and out for different transactions, smart contract agreements, and data exchanges between distributed applications (DApps) built on the blockchain. Besides, it also enables enterprise-ready blockchain networks that deliver:
- Throughput and latency approaching database speeds.
- Richer, more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models.
- Network policy management through distributed governance.
- Support for non-deterministic transactions.
Of late, interest in blockchain technology has been growing rapidly but achieving enterprise assurance is what has largely prevented its adoption and accelerate its development. Microsoft’s Etherium-based Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks aims to address these issues.
