by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, August 10, 2017

In a collaborative effort to further the use of blockchain technology, Microsoft and Intel announced on Thursday the development of the Coco Framework, which the companies hope will advance adoption across enterprises.

Many believe that the same blockchain technology used in many financial transactions to power cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin and Ether also can establish secure connections to help reduce fraud and increase transparency in advertising.

The Coco Framework is an open-source system intended to reduce the complexities of implementing high-scale, confidential blockchain network. When integrated with blockchain networks, the Coco Framework — in this case, a member network — addresses the needs for commercial adoption to increase speeds and improve secure transactions.

With a combination of advanced algorithms and processes, Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Azure at Microsoft, believes the framework is the next step toward making the blockchain ready for business.

“To start with a general framework is a step in the right direction for the advertising industry,” said Ken Brook, CEO at MetaX, which is building out technology to run on top of the Ethereum blockchain specific for digital advertising.

There are challenges. One includes the speed in which transaction occur. In terms of the Microsoft and Intel framework, when integrated with a blockchain network, key benefits include transaction speeds of more than 1,600 transactions per second, and an easier way to manage data confidentiality without sacrificing performance.

For the advertising industry, 1,600 transactions per second isn’t enough, Brook said. “We need to transact billions of events a day,” he said. “1,600 transactions per second won’t cut it for us, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

The initiative created by Microsoft and Intel also takes a consortium approach to developing the open-source technology through a member network. The two companies created what they call a “distributed governance model” for blockchain networks that allows members to vote on all terms governing the consortium and the blockchain software system.

In a public blockchain network, anyone can transact on the network because transactions run in a somewhat anonymous way, making the data untrustworthy and unreliable, per a whitepaper released with the news. In a member consortium blockchain network, member identities and nodes are known and controlled, and it becomes a controlled IT environment.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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