Nasdaq joins forces with Microsoft on blockchain technology

Nasdaq is teaming up with tech giant Microsoft on blockchain technology.

In an online post, Matthew Kerner General Manager, Microsoft Azure, announced that Nasdaq is bringing digital ledger interoperability to the Nasdaq Financial Framework (NFF) through Microsoft Azure Blockchain.

Released by Nasdaq in 2016, the NFF consists of a single operational core and connected to it is a vast spectrum of interoperable business applications designed to accomplish any operation across the trade lifecycle. It enables traders, exchanges and clearinghouses to interact with each other. The NFF has also been designed to enable end user firms to easily leverage the latest in technology developments.

Bloomberg reported that the NFF intends to offer customers the ability to use different blockchains through one common interface. Nasdaq believes that this will simplify and accelerate blockchain use and give customers the opportunity to choose the option that is best-suited to their needs.

Magnus Haglind, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Management for Nasdaq’s market technology business, said that key players in the industry are looking to emerging technologies such as blockchain and machine intelligence to enhance their efficiency and gain competitive advantage.

On these lines, Nasdaq is integrating the NFF with Microsoft Azure Blockchain to build a ledger agnostic blockchain capability that supports a multi-ledger strategy.

“Azure will deliver highly secure interoperation and communication between the Nasdaq Financial Framework core infrastructure, ecosystem middleware and customer technologies, using an innovative blockchain microservices suite to execute transactions and contracts,” Kerner said.

Nasdaq and Microsoft will create a “sophisticated blockchain system”, allowing various technologies to work together in a secure, scalable way, and enabling Nasdaq to meet their customer requirements across multiple projects.

Nasdaq sees immediate opportunity for blockchain to manage the delivery, payment, and settlement of transactions that may reside on multiple blockchains with different payment mechanisms. Tom Fay, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Nasdaq, said that the technology could also “provide value in secure, frictionless and instantaneous matching of buyers and sellers.”

“Our NFF integration with their blockchain services provides a layer of abstraction, making our offering ledger-agnostic, secure, highly scalable, and ultimately helps us continue to explore a much broader range of customer use cases for blockchain,” Fay added.