Tendermint has announced its addition to Microsoft’s suite of blockchain-related tools and applications as part of the tech giant’s Azure Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform.

Tendermint has been defined by its creators as a next-generation blockchain architecture that moves beyond limiting and monolithic token-based/bitcoin-like systems.

“We are proud to announce our partnership with Microsoft,” said Jae Kwon, CEO and founder of Tendermint.

“We'll be integrating Microsoft Azure Cloud into our MintNet blockchain deployment tool and testing large-scale blockchain networks hosted on Azure Cloud,” adding, “We look forward to reporting details and metrics on our experiments.”

Powering Ledger Apps

Tendermint’s technology offers modular architecture for blockchain development, with an open-source blockchain engine at its core, which can power any ledger application.

Whether it be based on Bitcoin’s UTXO, the Ethereum virtual machine, or entirely novel designs, explained Kwon, Tendermint can help power the network efficiently and to regulatory standards.

On Mar. 3, Tendermint was behind the scenes of an announcement by R3 CEV.

According to the announcement, the technology innovation firm, R3, completed trials with 40 banks using five different distributed ledger concepts. One of the concepts used was Eris:db developed by Eris Industries. The technology runs Tendermint’s consensus protocol.

Proof-of-stake protocol

Tendermint uses Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus, which design aims for not only accountability and regulatory compliance, but also scalability and speed.

Over 10,000 transactions per second, per blockchain can be achieved with Tendermint’s proof-of-stake protocol, with new blocks committed in less than 1000ms.

Tendermint’s consensus engine communicates to applications via a socket protocol called TMSP or Tendermint Socket Protocol. Furthermore, Tendermint is able to decompose the blockchain design by offering a very simple API between the application process and consensus process.

The TMSP is also language-agnostic, so developers can write smart-contracts in any programming language. Users can also leverage existing codebases, workflows and development ecosystems to build complex, production-quality applications.