Coinprism partners with Microsoft

Coinprism, the company behind “colored coins” standard Open Assets, used by NASDAQ and Overstock, has announced a partnership with software giant Microsoft.

“Since the launch of Openchain a couple of months ago, we have encountered a lot of interest from institutional players. Th[r]ough that new partnership, Microsoft will offer the Openchain stack as part of the Microsoft Azure platform,” said Coinprism in the blog post.

In its Openchain-announcing press release sent to CoinReport, Coinprism said that unlike Bitcoin, which is based on a central, unique distributed ledger, Openchain allows each user to deploy their own instance of Openchain, becoming administrator of that chain. The administrator can then define the policy determining how users are able to transact on that chain, said the company’s blog post. Coinprism said that one can configure his/her chain in several different ways including:

• Open-loop – a way with which anyone that has a private key can create an account anonymously and begin transacting.
• Closed-loop – a way with which the administrator will have to take users on board before users can transact. Coinprism said that this is an interesting model when KYC regulations apply.
• Anything in-between – a way with which anonymous accounts are allowed, but have less permissions compared with authenticated accounts.

Whatever way is chosen, the burden on the user will be minimum, unlike permissionless ledgers i.e. bitcoin. A light client application is the only thing the user needs; they do not need to run their own full nodes, which is entirely the responsibility of the service provider administrating the Openchain instance. Coinprism said this is a “more natural model,” elaborating that in order to access Gmail, we don’t have to run a mail server on our computers, but only a browser, as it is Google’s responsibility to maintain the infrastructure.

Front lobby entrance of building 17, one of the largest buildings on the Main Campus portion of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The circle in the lower-left is where cars drive up. Taken by Derrick Coetzee in April 2005, who releases all rights to the work and releases it into the public domain.

“This is where Microsoft’s offering comes into play,” said Coinprism.

“Through Microsoft Azure, you can now provision a new chain in the click of a button. The infrastructure is created on demand in Microsoft’s datacenters, and after a few minutes, you will be provided with the URL of your Openchain instance. Microsoft manages the hardware end to end and abstracts it away for you.”

Microsoft’s first template is a template for a test environment, said Coinprism, adding that although high availability is not certain, it can run on the smallest servers and cost as low as $13 per month. This way, about 20 transactions per second can be handled – a number of transactions per second that is already enough for many use cases. For bigger needs, said the company, one can of course provision larger servers.

Coinprism said that a template with high availability guarantees (99.95% availability) will be provided early next year.

Image credits:

Featured (homepage) image, Coinprism logo and Openchain logo – Courtesy of Coinprism

Microsoft building 17’s front lobby entrance – Public domain image by Derrick Coetzee