Newswise — Redmond, WA and New York City – Aug 31, 2017 – Today, Microsoft & IC3 announced joining the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), which includes faculty members at Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and the Technion, along with leading finance and technology companies. The partnership is anticipated to transform tomorrow’s financial systems to be much more flexible, transparent, efficient and secure.

“As we continue our journey in blockchain, we have watched and read the work of the IC3 team and are impressed with their thinking and the perspective they bring to the community.  We are very aligned with the approaches IC3 blockchain experts are taking to address scale, simplification, and other topics of interest for enterprise adoption.  The synergies in their research fit well with our visions for enterprise scale blockchain solutions,” said Yorke E. Rhodes III, Global Blockchain Business Strategist, Microsoft.  “We are excited to work more closely with IC3 through this membership.”

“IC3 was founded to advance blockchain science, technology and applications,” said Ari Juels, co-Director of IC3 and a professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City. “We’re delighted to work more closely with Microsoft’s blockchain experts, who share our vision of blockchain-based solutions for next generation financial services.”

About IC3

IC3 (www.initc3.org) is an initiative of faculty members at Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Technion. IC3 offers world-class expertise in computer science that spans cryptography, distributed systems, game theory, programming languages, and system security techniques. IC3’s innovations include new blockchain, smart contract, and cryptocurrency technologies that offer both the scientifically rigorous security properties and the robustness, performance, and reliability demanded by practitioners for tomorrow’s financial systems of execution and record.

IC3 is based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City. For information about joining IC3, please see http://www.initc3.org/partners.html

 

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leader in open-source contributions on GitHub, and maintains an open cloud ecosystem supporting the most relevant blockchain solutions for enterprise and startups.  Microsoft has collaborated to create enterprise tooling around existing open source blockchain solutions, making them more accessible to enterprise development.  Examples include Ethereum, HyperlLedger, Quorum and more.  Microsoft also works closely with non open source blockchain vendors such as AlphaPoint, BlockApps, Chain, and R3.  Using this tooling, enterprises can deploy blockchain consortium networks quickly allowing them to focus on building applications to solve business scenarios.  For more information on Microsoft’s work in blockchain, visit www.microsoft.com/blockchain.