Its getting hard to keep saying blockchain for everything in this space, so I'll just start referring to it as the distributed ledger ecosystem. Azure Blockchain as a Service has become a very diverse ecosystem hosting a wide variety of technologies.

Open, is perhaps what best describes the current environment: A place for partners to put new platforms, frameworks, tools and services for curious customers to discover and experiment with. What is the best way to find out how well a consensus protocol performs in a geographically distributed network? Azure of course! What is the right platform to test out a wild idea for distributed ledger technology without breaking the bank (pun intended)? Azure of course! How should you go about testing a particular platform against your functional and non-functional requirements? Azure of course!

Well, enough of that, this update welcomes several new partners:

A decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. To learn more about how a revolutionary decentralized platform like Augur actually works, watch this short animated video narrated by Country singer Shooter Jennings that simplifies this complex project.

The global platform will enable precise forecasts on any topic - from politics to commerce, from technology to entertainment. With Augur on Azure, businesses can use prediction markets to forecast product launch dates, whether projects should be funded, sales numbers and other key metrics, or anything else they’d like to have more accurate information on.

On Azure, Augur will offer a turn-key solution for enterprises interested in running an internal version of the platform. A company may not want their markets public or may not want to deal with the compliance costs of running a public market. Employees could even be incentivized to predict by rewarding accurate forecasters with internal or external perks. We are proud to make the announcement that Augur’s beta is now live and ready to be accessed.

Lisk aims to revolutionize decentralized application and blockchain technology. Powered by its own crypto-currency Lisk, the platform allows developers worldwide to easily deploy their own custom blockchains, and program decentralized applications on top of them, using the highly accessible programming language JavaScript.

They will provide guides and ARM templates to use Lisk for the Internet of Things, custom blockchain deployment and development of decentralized applications. We want to make this experience as easy as possible for JavaScript developers, using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

This blockchain is a Financial Services platform for SmartCoins coupled with a decentralized asset exchange. Everything is open source at GitHub and available under the MIT license.

A SmartCoin is price-stable digital asset pegged to the value of various currencies, commodities, stocks and other financial instruments within a derivatives market. This is accomplished by sourcing pricing information from world financial markets, then publishing it to the blockchain to inform the decentralized asset exchange. Markets are made between any asset pairs therein on a serialized order book to mitigate frontloading and maximize transaction throughput.

The industrial-grade blockchain currently operates at a three-second block interval with peaks to thousands of transaction per second. BitShares accomplishes this speed while maintaining transaction and identity security through a unique democratic consensus algorithm. Give it a try.

Syscoin's suite of blockchain-enabled services provide merchants the ability to buy and sell goods and services, encrypted messaging, escrow, digital asset storage, reselling and more. Syscoin also provides a replacement for typical blockchain addresses, known as aliases; providing ease-of-use.

The goal of Syscoin is to integrate with major centralized marketplace and e-commerce platforms to help ease merchants transition from centralized marketplace solutions to decentralized, blockchain-based marketplaces with lower costs, better reliability and a much higher level of redundancy. Test it out.

Slock.it aims to address security, identity, coordination and privacy over billions of devices. As part of the collaborative economy, it allows for any object to be rented, sold or share securely, without middlemen. Integration with Microsoft Azure will make it very easy for developers to build apps for Slock.it first product, the Ethereum Computer.

Apps built on Azure Compute Cloud can be deployed without modifications to the Ethereum Computer, making the Azure cloud the perfect environment to experiment with Slock.it. Deploying Slock.it on Azure also means simplified and valuable integration with business analytics, data management, identity and messaging.

Physical access control can be automated and decentralized with the Slock.it App, and now with Azure integration, it can be done as part of an incremental transition toward decentralization, waiving the need to call an expensive integrator or spending months experimenting with costly PoCs.

Looking forward to an exciting couple of weeks with Microsoft Build and Envision conferences right around the corner!