Chainlink’s Smartcon summit on August 28th and 29th revealed that the project’s focus is not just to link smart contracts on the blockchain to off-chain data streams so they can operate fairly and as designed. At the end of the summit, Chainlink proved it always meant to interconnect blockchains, projects, and people to reveal the beauty of the underlying technology. For the attendants, it must have been an experience of a lifetime. According to a recap released by Chainlink:

“Chainlink’s first-ever SmartCon Summit marked a major 2020 blockchain event. We saw 8,000+ attendees, representing 100+ countries from all 7 continents, join over 130 speakers for 70+ talks, panels, workshops and AMAs. We heard from developers, dApp teams, node operators, researchers, and enterprise leaders sharing their cutting edge research and current thinking about the future of decentralized technology.”

Of the sessions was the showcase of how blockchain has been instrumental in the hands of enterprises. Speakers from Microsoft, Oracle, T-Systems, Armanino, and other enterprise companies revealed how they have utilized blockchain technology and smart contracts to eliminate intermediaries and waiting times to better serve their customers and become an enterprise that is forward-thinking amidst peers. 

Yorke Rhodes from Microsoft revealed how he had worked over the past years to expose the company to new online technology to break it forth. He stated that Microsoft had been involved in blockchain technology as early as 2016. This was what brought the surprising collaboration between Microsoft and Sony’s XBOX in 2018 to bring it at par and even beyond Google Stadia. May 20th, 2019, Tom Warren from The Verge reported:

“Sony has now turned to Microsoft for help, instead of competitors like Google or Amazon. Sony and Microsoft’s deal could have been a simple one to host Sony’s services on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform…”

Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure is a blockchain-based solution that offers royalty information to Xbox game publishers in real-time thus eliminating waiting times. Microsoft stated in a release:

“The Xbox Finance team adopted blockchain technology in 2018, seeking to eliminate the need for time-consuming reconciliation and shorten the access time to royalties information for its game publishers from 45 days to minutes.”

Yorke also stated that since 2016, Microsoft had been involved in investigating other use cases of blockchain technology for example the use of public blockchains in “identity-based on a distributed public key infrastructure”. This was what birthed Microsoft’s Decentralized Identity which originated the collaboration between Microsoft and Mastercard in 2018.