Over the past two years, the relationship between Microsoft and the blockchain has reached new heights. Microsoft’s little fling with the blockchain has shown signs of real seriousness as the company seems avid on securing its share in the blockchain market. 

How can Microsoft limb behind, when the rest of the world is experimenting with the blockchain? Microsoft has been an avid investor and innovator when it comes to experimenting with new technologies. In a recent move as reported by Hindustan Times, Microsoft in partnership with Tech Mahindra, which is a leading solution provider, has come up with the idea of solving the problem of spam calls by using the blockchain.

This move of these tech giants come in response to TRAI’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) order to all telecom operators to use blockchain technology to curb the menace of spam calls. The new norms have made it mandatory to explicitly record a user’s consent on the blockchain to receive marketing calls. It also gives users access to revoke their consent to receive marketing calls anytime. If an operator doesn’t follow these norms, he would be liable to face a penalty of up to Indian Rupees 500,000 per month.

The aim of this project is to provide an all-round solution to the problem of spam calls, so that different operators including all telecom operators, legal authorities, users, and even telemarketers, don’t have to worry about developing their own solution. This project will be sufficient for telecom operators to stay compliant with TRIA’s new regulations.

At present Microsoft has refrained from revealing the exact technical details of the product but has announced that the project would be built upon the Microsoft Azure Platform and would also be using cloud services. This was marked by the statement of Prashant Shukla, National Technology officer of Microsoft India. He stated various details of the project and said, “The intersection of Cloud and Blockchain will ensure a new way of monitoring and enforcing compliance throughout the ecosystem.” He further added, “With a Microsoft Azure Blockchain-powered solution, we will ensure that we mitigate loopholes used by fraudsters and spammers to reach end users.”

A similar press statement was also released by Tech Mahindra which states, “The solution will be a shared, secured ledger of UCCs [unsolicited commercial communication] distributed across a network of computers. This will ensure a transparent and verifiable system to help companies mitigate UCC on their networks.” 

This is not the first affair of Microsoft with the blockchain and Microsoft seems very ambitious in ruling the blockchain world. Earlier in February 2018, Microsoft announced a blockchain-based digital identity management solution, followed by the announcement of the blockchain project to manage copyrights and loyalties in June 2018.

The fate of these projects is unknown. But this time the situation is different as there is a deadline for telecom operators to abide by the regulations. So let us be optimistic about the unraveling of Microsoft’s one of the ambitious blockchain projects.