Microsoft partners with ConsenSys, enabling its developers to build applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Microsoft Office 365 roadmap also highlights further cryptocurrencies integration, announcing Bitcoin Currency Format Support.

Through the partnership with ConsenSys, Microsoft adds Ethereum’s Solidity programming language used for writing smart self-executing contracts to its Visual Studio platform. This will allow Microsoft developers to create decentralised applications (dapps) on their “mother” platform. Besides, the company will be able to execute programmes on Ethereum’s network.

It is not the first time when Microsoft and ConsenSys are collaborating. In October 2015, when Microsoft announced its cloud-computing service Azure, ConsenSys was the first to join it. Due to this partnership, Ethereum’s toolkit Blockchain-as-a-Service becomes available via Microsoft Azure providing access to the blockchain builder Strato, Ethereum's blockchain explorer Ether.Camp and Blockchain Apps.

The new partnership was announced on 31 March at Microsoft’s Build Conference in San Francisco. At the same time, Microsoft issued a roadmap for Microsoft Office 365 that also shows the company's aspiration to advance bitcoin. The roadmap includes Bitcoin Currency Format Support feature to be added to Excel. This feature will allow Microsoft Office users to analyse bitcoin-related information in Excel. Bitcoin Currency Format Support is currently at the development stage but is already known to be available soon in many versions of the program: Excel for Windows, Excel Mobile, Excel for Android and Excel Mobile for Windows.

In the beginning of March 2016, it was mistakenly reported that Microsoft Store cancels bitcoin payments option which caused a disturbance within the bitcoin community. Three days later, however, Microsoft denied the refusal allegations, referring to the previous information as “a mistake”.

Anna Lavinskaya