Richard Humphreys |
Nasdaq is partnering with Microsoft to implement blockchain capabilities. The global stock exchange is integrating the Nasdaq Financial Framework with Microsoft Azure Blockchain to build a ledger agnostic blockchain capability that supports a multi-ledger strategy.
According to a blog post by Matthew Kerner, general manager of Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft Azure cloud will deliver highly secure interoperation and communication between the Nasdaq Financial Framework core infrastructure, ecosystem middleware and customer technologies, using an innovative blockchain microservices suite to execute transactions and contracts.
“These offerings create a sophisticated blockchain system that allow various technologies to work together in a secure, scalable way, and enable Nasdaq to meet their customer requirements across multiple projects,” Kerner said.
Nasdaq sees immediate opportunity for blockchain to manage the delivery, payment, and settlement of transactions that may reside on multiple blockchains with different payment mechanisms. “With multiple blockchains in use by various industry participants, we believe that the combination of NFF and Microsoft’s blockchain technology can remove some of the project complexities that exist in this realm,” says Tom Fay, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Nasdaq. “Additionally, as more industries move towards capital markets technology and structures, we see the potential for blockchain to provide value in secure, frictionless and instantaneous matching of buyers and sellers.”
Kerner said these capabilities will also allow capital market organisations to use any NFF-based applications that incorporate blockchain technologies without the need for ledger-specific skills or knowledge, which is critical as the industry pursues new use cases for distributed ledger technology.
“From our perspective, Azure is unlocking the power of the blockchain while removing major complexities,” added Fay. “Our NFF integration with their blockchain services provides a layer of abstraction, making our offering ledger-agnostic, secure, highly scalable, and ultimately helps us continue to explore a much broader range of customer use cases for blockchain. Delegating to Microsoft – as a best of breed enterprise-quality partner and leader in the blockchain space – to handle all of the semantics of ledger communication, security, deployment and orchestration, allows us to focus on customer challenges and solutions at scale, rather than expending resources on building components that fall outside our core business.”