Microsoft is turning off its corporate Azure Blockchain Service on September 10 and will not accept any new deployments effective immediately, with no official explanation provided. Large corporate customers who use Azure Blockchain include J.P. Morgan, GE Aviation, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks, and Xbox according to its website. The announcement was made in a low key post on the Microsoft documentation site on Monday, informing all current customers to migrate to alternate services. ConsenSys Quorum Blockchain Service was the only suggestion and ConsenSys founder and CEO Joseph Lubin welcomed the Azure refugees: “Expanding our relationship with Microsoft helps organizations take advantage …

Cypherium blockchain joins the Microsoft for Startups program with the goal of becoming a part of the company’s blockchain-as-a-service, or BaaS, offering in the coming months. Cypherium blockchain uses a combination of proof-of-work, or PoW, and HotStuff consensus algorithms. The latter is also used by Facebook’s Libra project. Libra retreating In a Cointelegraph interview, Cypherium CEO, Sky Guo, said that with the recent changes made to the Libra whitepaper, his project is seemingly the only permissionless platform to use HotStuff: “Also Libra originally planned to become permissionless in the next five to three years. But recently in their new whitepaper, …

Microsoft has acknowledged that the quarantined gamers are putting a strain on its Azure cloud platform which is a backbone of the company’s Blockchain As a Service (BaaS) offering. In the SEC filing, Microsoft addresses the impact of “the global health pandemic” on its Azure cloud services. The company admits that in certain regions “deployments for some compute resource types (...) drop below our typical 99.99 percent success rates”. Furthermore, Microsoft confirms that “Xbox Live [is] putting a strain on overall Azure capacity:” “As a result of the surge in use over the last week, we have experienced significant demand …

The financial technology subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Ant Financial, started testing its enterprise blockchain platform. According to local news outlet Sina Finance on Nov. 12th, the senior director of technology and business innovation at Ant Financial, Jieli Li, announced the development at the World Blockchain Summit at Wuzhen. The firm’s plans to launch its own blockchain platform were first reported in September last year. During the event, Li said that the platform — dubbed Ant Blockchain Open Alliance — will go live three months after the testing period. The platform aims to support small and medium-sized businesses by …

While we often get to hear about how cryptocurrency adoption is rapidly gaining ground in the West, a number of countries across the Middle East — such as Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia — often tend to get overlooked, despite them having made tremendous strides when it comes to establishing regulatory frameworks that are geared toward the optimal utilization of this burgeoning asset class. For example, a recent report by Asia Times has revealed that the UAE is one of the few nations in the world where the local government has placed special emphasis on promoting the …

Chinese telecommunications hardware giant Huawei is studying the entire Latin American market and considering expanding its operations, Cointelegraph Brazil reports on June 13. Per the report, a Huawei executive said at the CIAB Febraban conference on June 11 that it is possible its blockchain-enabled products and services will soon be available on the continent. The executive in question — who asked to remain anonymous — noted: “Everything will depend on the outcome of our market analysis and in case there is a market demand for blockchain we will make our services available in this area. Today we are focused on …

Online retail giant Amazon has partnered with United Kingdom-based insurance agency Legal & General to create a blockchain system for managing corporate pension deals, according to a report by Reuters on June 11. Legal & General will reportedly make use of the Amazon Managed Blockchain for its bulk annuity transactions, which happen when companies transfer their pension schemes to Legal & General for insurance. According to an article by the Financial Times, companies make bulk annuity transactions to insurers like this so that they are not ultimately responsible for personally paying their employees’ pensions. CEO of Legal & General Reinsurance …

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has applied for over 200 blockchain patents, according to a report by Securities Daily News on May 20. The report also notes that major e-commerce competitor Alibaba has applied for 262 blockchain patents, and Chinese internet titans Tencent and Baidu have applied for 80 and 50 such patents, respectively, as recorded by the Intellectual Property Center of China Information and Communication. According to interpretation of the data provided by Intellectual Property Center of China Information and Communication, JD.com was in first place for “global blockchain patent strength,” with Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu coming it at second, …

American blockchain startup Data Gumbo Corp. has raised $6 million from major energy companies, including the venture wing of Saudi Arabian national petroleum and natural gas company Saudi Aramco. The news was published by energy-focused news outlet Worldoil on May 8. In a Series A equity funding round, Data Gumbo ostensibly raised $6 million from companies such as Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, the venture subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, and Equinor Technology Ventures, the venture subsidiary of Equinor, a Norwegian multinational energy operator. The new investment purportedly brings Data Gumbo’s total funding up to $9.3 million. The funds will be used …

United States-based coffee chain Starbucks will implement tech giant Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service to track coffee production, tech news site GeekWire reports on May 6. Starbucks first announced its “bean to cup” initiative in 2018, stating that it would work with farmers in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Rwanda to pilot a blockchain-based coffee-tracking system. The system will purportedly allow customers to track the production of their coffee and will open up potential financial opportunities for coffee bean farmers on the backend. Starbucks further noted that they would open source the pilot program to disseminate their findings. The two companies presented …

China’s cyberspace administration has released the first list — 197 companies long — of registered blockchain service providers, according to their March 30 notice. Chinese initiatives by internet giants such as Baidu Blockchain Engine, Alibaba Cloud Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), Tencent BaaS (TBaaS) and the BaaS platform owned by e-commerce giant JD.com appear on the list. Financial institutions such as the China Zheshang Bank and Ping An Insurance Company are also included. Some less-known companies such as blockchain-enabled supply chain management service VeChain and parcel delivery service ParcelX are present on the list as well. The article also notes that no institution …

The blockchain platform built by one of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) two telecoms operators has received an official endorsement from the government as part of the country’s blockchain integration, executives confirmed in a press release on April 3. Du, formerly known officially as Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, created its Blockchain-Platform-as-a-Service (BPaas) to offer cloud-based private blockchain hosting compatible with both Ethereum (ETH) and the Hyperledger Fabric. Now, the platform has received the seal of approval from Smart Dubai, the government organization in charge of transforming state-level services with the leveraging of disruptive technologies by 2021. “The Dubai blockchain agenda …