New Delhi, Aug 16 (IANS): With a rise in the adoption of Blockchain technology, Microsoft on Wednesday announced 'Coco Framework', a first-of-its-kind innovation that aims to improve performance, confidentiality and governance of enterprises.

Current blockchain protocol technology requires complicated development techniques to meet the operational and security needs of enterprises and Coco Framework reduces this complexity, the company said in a statement.

A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.

Microsoft will launch the framework on Internet hosting service GitHub in 2018 as an open source project.

When 'Coco Framework' is integrated with popular blockchain protocols, it addresses and improves on critical needs for commercial blockchain applications, including high transaction speed (faster by roughly 100 times), distributed governance (network constitution that allows members to vote) and confidentiality (without compromising performance).

Recently, Microsoft was selected as the exclusive cloud partner by BankChain, a platform for banks in India (comprising State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, DCB Bank, Kotak Bank, Bank of Baroda, Deutsche Bank and others) to explore, build, and implement blockchain solutions using Microsoft Azure Blockchain.