Microsoft’s embrace of the Ethereum ecosystem continues to steadily grow.
On Friday, the tech giant revealed it was integrating development tools from blockchain development startup Truffle, which was initially launched under the umbrella of Ethereum venture studio ConsenSys before being independently spun out this year, on its Azure cloud computing marketplace.
As Truffle’s description now explains on its Azure landing page, the tool suite is geared toward making it easy for organizations to build on Ethereum:
“Truffle is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for the Ethereum Blockchain, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier. With Truffle, you get: Built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management. Automated contract testing with Mocha and Chai.”
Microsoft has confirmed its Azure clients have had access to Truffle since last month. Notably, the suite’s tools have already been downloaded nearly 3 million times before its entrance to Microsoft’s cloud arm. For its part, Azure offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) products, with blockchain tech like Truffle increasingly being brought into its fold.
On the news, Azure Blockchain Engineering manager Marc Mercuri explained that the embrace was deliberate and focused:
“We really believe in the power of blockchain. This is not some arbitrary thing that we’re going to do because customers are forcing us.”
The key takeaway? Microsoft’s enterprise clients can now build atop the public Ethereum chain or private versions of it more readily than ever.
Microsoft Just Open-Sourced VeriSol
Truffle’s onboarding to Azure is only Microsoft’s latest Ethereum-centric foray.
Earlier this month, the Microsoft Research division and the Microsoft Azure Blockchain team declared they were open-source publishing a novel verification and analzyer tool called VeriSol. It was designed to ensure the security and production-readiness of smart contracts written in Solidity, Ethereum’s major programming language.
Like Truffle, VeriSol was designed to make building on Ethereum easier and faster. As Azure’s Senior Software Engineer Cody Born explained at the time:
“VeriSol allows us to iterate more quickly because of the automatic and continuous checking, and it allows us to catch bugs faster without having to worry about potentially affecting customers.”
It’s a tangible gift to Ethereum’s nook of the cryptoeconomy, as now any individual or organization can leverage VeriSol’s security benefits. Ethereum smart contracts can’t be edited once they’re live, so VeriSol will be used to ensure forthcoming smart contracts won’t need to be edited in the future in helping to identify would-be bugs.
JP Morgan’s Ethereum Fork Gets Microsoft Azure Support
In May, Microsoft and JP Morgan announced a strategic partnership that saw the banking powerhouse’s permissioned Ethereum fork, Quorum, added as the inaugural blockchain on the Azure Blockchain Service.
The idea? Namely that companies won’t have to run their own infrastructure if they want to start building apps on Quorum.
That’s a growing specter, too, as JP Morgan’s Quorum-based Interbank Information Network (IIN) already boasts more than 200 member institutions — some of which may eventually want to build their own financial applications using the enterprise blockchain, which reportedly may be spun off as an independent project from JP Morgan.
Indeed, there may soon be growing demand for Quorum solutions if JP Morgan’s forthcoming stablecoin-like token, JPM Coin, achieves popularity. Built on Quorum, JPM Coin will use a deposit system that will see its tokens underpinned by fiat reserves held at the bank’s premises.
Notably, the Truffle suite is compatible with Quorum, so JP Morgan’s partners can now also leverage its tools to make apps around JPM Coin and IIN.
