September 11, the 4th 2018 Global Blockchain Summit was successfully held in Shanghai. In the afternoon, Xu Jianzhi, the chief project manager of Microsoft Azure, delivered a speech on “The Design Modes and Practices of Enterprise Blockchain Importing”.

Xu indicated that among the top 500 companies in the world, many of them have put a lot of efforts in blockchain adoption. He believes that when there is a middleman in a system, it will cause the issue of inefficiency and that’s why we need to adopt blockchain technology.

He further demonstrated Microsoft’s standpoints in the blockchain field. First of all, the firm is about to support all the open ecosystems, not just Ethereum, Quorum, Corda or Hyperledger, any ecosystem can be supported by Microsoft as long as they have certain customer base.

In addition, Microsoft also plans to provide end-to-end solutions which contains not only the blockchain, but also includes key management, data query, identity system integration and other services.

Finance is the most well known application scenario for blockchain usage. Traditional financial institutions, such as banks, need the third-party to complete the liquidation process which is ineffective and time consuming. As thus, they eye blockchain for technical innovation.

As of press time, 8 banks that have participated in the blockchain application. They set up subsidiaries to specialize in blockchain applications. Microsoft has provided technical support to those banks and helps them to build a blockchain network (a consortium blockchain), which allows small-amount transfers between different banks to run directly on the Azure blockchain. By using blockchain, the role of the middleman has been cut, the efficiency has been enhanced and the cost has been cut.

Xu also disclose that, Microsoft will provide a hybrid cloud solution in the near future based on their customer feedback. He indicated that, it usually takes 3-5 weeks for an enterprise to build a blockchain network on its own, while it can be down in 3-5 minutes when they uses Microsoft Azure service.