Microsoft wants to build a blockchain-based identity solution

Leveraging on possible opportunities on identity systems, Microsoft is looking into building a blockchain-based identity system and it has recently sealed a partnership to further this goal.

The tech giant has made an open source collaboration with companies Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys for their current Bitcoin and Ethereum-based identity solutions, together with various developers globally.

Blockchain, while more familiarly used in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, is a technology that has other uses and can store transaction history of various kinds of records. Through the partnership, Microsoft said it is looking to create an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows "people, products, apps, and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers, and organizations".

"Through this open source collaboration we intend to produce a cross-chain identity solution that can be extended to any future blockchains or new kinds of decentralized, distributed systems", Microsoft said in its blog post announcement.

Microsoft said that it will have an open source framework available on Azure in the coming weeks, where developers will be able to setup and explore an open source identity layer and figure out the possible benefits it could bring to their application.

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