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In a joint statement released today, JPMorgan tried to position the partnership with Microsoft—which will allow enterprises to use the bank's publicly available Quorum blockchain—as having implications far beyond the corporate world. The two companies, whose combined valuation is $1.3 trillion, said they signed a memorandum of understanding to accelerate the adoption of blockchain among large enterprises. The statement positions JPMorgan as the first distributed ledger platform available through the Azure Blockchain Service, a set of tools designed to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft’s cloud platform.
Public blockchains like ethereum, which anyone can access, were originally hailed as a way to move value without middlemen like banks, which many of their early users did not trust in the years following the financial collapse of 2007-08. Permissioned versions like Quorum have promised to streamline workflows in the middle and back offices of enterprises by removing middlemen and to increase transparency in supply chains.