While Ethereum hasn’t been around for long, it is definitely attracting the attention of hundreds upon hundreds of technology companies, including Microsoft, currently worth around $561 billion.

With this aspect in mind, not long ago, Microsoft has announced and released the Coco framework, which stands for Confidential Consortium. To put things better into perspective, Coco is actually an Ethereum-based project which will allow both large-scale organizations alongside with commercial companies to process information via the Ethereum blockchain, while getting access to much better privacy and data protection.

During the last couple of months, numerous advancements have been made in terms of blockchain technology, and this is quite understandable given its rising popularity. Not long ago, a platform known by the name of BankChain, which is basically meant to help banks implement blockchain-based solutions, has announced that they have partnered up with Microsoft.

Thanks to this partnership, the members of the BankChain consortium will now be able to use Microsoft Azure as their main cloud partner. In a recent press statement, the general manager of Microsoft’s Partner and Enterprise Group mentioned that: “The partnership with BankChain underscores our commitment to enable the digital transformation of the BFSI [banking, financial services, and insurance] sector in India. Blockchain is one of the most exciting innovations in this sector and we at Microsoft are leading this trend by offering the best-in-class Azure Blockchain offering. We look forward to working with stakeholders like Primechain to make this partnership a success.”

Contrary to popular belief, banks and governments aren’t the only institutions interested in understanding more about blockchain technology, and potentially implementing it. In fact, Microsoft has recently unveiled the newest version of their consortium blockchain software product, at the Annual Ethereum Developer Conference over in Shanghai.

For those that do not know, back in June, Microsoft announced a project meant to allow businesses from all around the world to freely build consortiums and take better advantage of the currently available blockchain technology. Known by the name of Project Bletchley, it represents an open and modular blockchain fabric, which allows users to freely construct and scale member-only, permissioned blockchain consortiums. Microsoft believes that since the blockchain network is basically a distributed ledger technology, this allows its power to be directly proportional to the number of companies and individuals using it to build new networks.