Microsoft joins Nasdaq in blockchain project for ‘digital ledger interoperability’

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Microsoft, through its Azure cloud computing service, will be collaborating with stock exchange company Nasdaq to provide clients with better payment mechanisms.

Microsoft Azure General Manager Matthew Kerner announced the partnership in a blog post, saying that “Azure will deliver highly secure interoperation and communication between the Nasdaq Financial Framework [NFF] core infrastructure, ecosystem middleware and customer technologies, using an innovative blockchain microservices suite to execute transactions and contracts.”

Nasdaq Senior Vice-President of Enterprise Architecture Tom Fay was quoted as saying, “[A]s more industries move towards capital markets technology and structures, we see the potential for blockchain to provide value in secure, frictionless and instantaneous matching of buyers and sellers.”

Kerner said that capital market organizations using applications based on the NFF platform will be able to do so “without the need for ledger-specific skills or knowledge, which is critical as the industry pursues new use cases for distributed ledger technology.”

Fay added, “Delegating to Microsoft—as a best of breed enterprise-quality partner and leader in the blockchain space—to handle all of the semantics of ledger communication, security, deployment and orchestration, allows us to focus on customer challenges and solutions at scale, rather than expending resources on building components that fall outside our core business.”

Kerner noted that it was Nasdaq that first offered the first-ever electronic stock exchange, back in 1971.

Nasdaq has reportedly been exploring a platform for the offering of security tokens, and is in talks with several blockchain firms on the matter. As further evidence of its commitment to blockchain ventures, the company has applied and been granted a patent for the providing of news through the technology, with each news item being recorded and scheduled for release at specific times.

Microsoft has partnered with professional service firm Ernst & Young in using blockchain to manage royalties and content rights. The platform will provide users with real-time access to data pertaining to the content they supply, built on the Quorum blockchain protocol and using Microsoft Azure cloud technology.