Talk of the benefits of smart contracts on the blockchain has been around for awhile, but Williamsburg-based Consensys is now in business with the big boys, partnering with Microsoft’s Azure platform this week.
The partnership came from “Essentially a cold call,” Consensys Director of Communications Andrew Keys wrote in an email to Technical.ly. “I emailed the director of cloud strategy for MSFT. They loved the idea and now we’re off to the races :)”
The partnership will offer Azure customers tools and applications for building ethereum blockchain apps on two platforms, one called BlockApps and one called Ether.Camp.
“BlockApps is a private/semi private developer sandbox that will launch capability to be launched into the public Ethereum network,” Keys explained. “Ether.Camp is an integrated developer environment (IDE), which I explain to laypeople as like Microsoft Word for programmers, whereby you if you code something wrong there will be an error message, like when you misspell on MS Word there’s red line below the word.”
The move marks a big step for the Ethereum-based company, founded by Ethereum co-creator Joseph Lubin.
