News

AWS Partners To Assist Enterprise Blockchain Experimentation

• By David Ramel
• 05/09/2016

Digital Currency Group (DCG) announced it was collaborating with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) to help enterprises better leverage blockchain technology, the underlying basis for the digital currency called bitcoin.

A blockchain "is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision," according to Wikipedia. "The blockchain is seen as the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks."

DCG and AWS are teaming up to remove the friction involved when experimenting with the technology.

"Blockchain -- also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT) -- has seen a significant amount of interest and investment from financial institutions, insurance companies and enterprise technology companies," DCG said in a statement last week. "This collaboration enables blockchain providers to work with their corporate customers more efficiently by providing an accessible, secure platform that facilitates experimentation with this technology on the AWS cloud."

DCG, which says it builds and supports blockchain companies, said that in conducting its business it identified a need for a trusted environment in which blockchain providers could interact with corporate customers.

"AWS's extensive work with both blockchain providers and enterprises trying to integrate DLT solutions into their operations identified an opportunity to better facilitate interaction between those customers, while fostering innovation," DCG said. "Enterprises working with DCG and its portfolio companies for their expertise in blockchain will have access to cloud services and technical resources from AWS in support of blockchain experiments."

DCG said it will facilitate proctored experiments by itself and partners in the AWS cloud, which provides a secure and stable testing platform for access-controlled development, testing and production environments. Its companies already taking advantage of this effort include BigchainDB, Blockstream, Chain, Everledger, Onename and RSK Labs (Rootstock), with more expected to join.

"Enterprises collaborating with DCG and its portfolio companies for their expertise in blockchain will also have access to cloud services and technical resources from AWS in support of blockchain experiments," the company said. Those interested in taking part in the program were encouraged to contact DCG.