Millions of Microsoft developers are now able to build decentralized applications using the Ethereum blockchain thanks to a collaboration between the software giant and Consensys, announced today.
By building Ethereum’s Solidity programming language for writing smart contracts directly into Mircosoft’s Visual Studio platform, developers will be able to build, test and deploy decentralized applications, or dapps , within an integrated environment they already know how to use.
But don’t think this is a money play for either Consensys, or Microsoft, at least not yet.
In a conversation with CoinDesk, CEO of Consensys, Joe Lubin said that growing the number of developers using the distributed ledger technology was first and foremost about reimagining social, economic and political systems.
Lubin, who is also the co-founder of Ethereum told CoinDesk: "It’s in our best interest, and in our mission, to help with the adoption of Ethereum in all its different forms — public, private, consortium — and this just makes that that much easier." The Consensys integration with Microsoft uses smart contract programming language Solidity to let developers run programs on the Ethereum network, also called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Announced today at Microsoft’s Build Conference in San Francisco, the new functionality was scheduled to go live this morning at 10am EST.
With Ethereum’s Solidity language, developers will be able to write applications using self-enforcing smart contracts that can theoretically execute as wide a range of business transactions as the coder can imagine.
Ethereum’s cryptocurrency, ether, powers the applications, and is currently valued at about $11.60, with a market cap of over $900m. By comparison, bitcoin’s market cap is $6.3bn.
The EVM transactions — or smart contract executions as they may be more accurately called — can then be recorded on what Consensys described in a statement as a "non-repudiable and authoritative" record using either the public or […]
