NASDAQ Announces Partnership with Microsoft Azure Blockchain

Today I’ll tell you more about NASDAQ’s announcement last week of its partnership with Azure blockchain. Microsoft will integrate its Azure blockchain technology into stock exchange NASDAQ’s financial framework – a software that provides a trading infrastructure and operations outsourcing and fulfills NASDAQ’s risk and surveillance technology offering.

With this partnership, NASDAQ and Microsoft will create a ledger agnostic blockchain capability that will allow for operability across multiple ledgers. It will facilitate easier buyer and seller matching, management of delivery and payment, and settlement of transactions.

For those of you unaware of what blockchain is, it’s a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptology. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, as well as a time stamp and its transactional data.

Some common uses are things like cryptocurrency smart contracts in banks, as well as the start of seeing more logistic uses from big players like UPS and IBM.

By integrating Azure blockchain, this will allow NASDAQ’s financial framework customers to deploy various blockchains through one common interface, as well as promote blockchain development. In other words, they’re setting up this partnership to build a platform for more blockchain development in other areas and also for cryptocurrencies.

NASDAQ recently revealed a new blockchain pattern which refers to an information computer system provided for securely releasing time-sensitive information to recipients via a blockchain. With this pattern, the NASDAQ is looking to ease the releasing of timely information to media while keeping it secure and water-tight from a legal standpoint.

As they need to make announcements around earnings and such, and ensure that is secure for regulatory reasons, they’re using a blockchain as a secure mechanism for this.

In a previous announcement, a NASDAQ representative said that they are exploring adding crypto datasets to its market analytics tool. By forming this partnership with Microsoft, this could be the platform used.

In August, Microsoft Azure introduced a proof-of-authority (PoA) algorithm on its Ethereum (ETH) blockchain product. Proof-of-authority algorithm is based on the principle of approved identities or validators on a blockchain and doesn’t require competition in completing the transactions.

Microsoft put this platform together and now we have a major player in NASDAQ wanting to take advantage of it. I’m very interested to see where this big announcement goes. At Pragmatic Works, we are working with all kind of things within Azure, including blockchain, data science and everything in the data space.

If you need help in your environment or just want to talk through some things you’re doing, we’d love to speak with you. Click the link below or contact us—our Azure experts are here to help.