Microsoft Reveals Blockchain Tokens Platform

Microsoft Corporation’s MSFT Azure Blockchain Tokens platform is now available for preview, the company announced on Monday.

What Happened

The new platform will allow enterprises or individuals to easily "create their own blockchain tokens" based on the Token Taxonomy Initiative (TTI) standards.

The TTI framework is essentially a “non-technical definition of what a token is,” decided upon by the members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) which include Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM, and ING Group N.V. INGA, among other major companies and blockchain startups. IBM's IBM Hyperledger is also an associate member of the bloc.

What’s Next

Following the TTI framework will allow the tokens created on the Azure platform to have interoperability. It means that a token built on the Azure platform will be portable to, for example, IBM’s blockchain platform, as both of them run on the Ethereum network as of now.

“The industry has suffered from an IBM versus Microsoft thing, Hyperledger versus [Ethereum], and so on. We are trying to break down those barriers,” Microsoft’s Marley Grey, who also heads the EEA bloc, told CoinDesk.

“You can go and buy a printer or any type of device now and just plug it in, and it works. It’s the same analogy here for tokens, and that is what we are building in Azure,” he said.