29.03.2024

PegaSys Ethereum Suite Now Available on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace

The Azure allure draws in thousands of potential developers to build within the blockchain ecosystem by providing them with development kits necessary for constructing web 3.0 infrastructure, including cloud computing.

The PegaSys Ethereum Suite, which includes ​Hyperledger Besu,​​ PegaSys Plus​ and PegaSys Orchestrate​, will help developers deploy multi-node networks with blockchain explorers, monitoring and dashboards, Ethereum development studio ConsenSys said in a press release on Friday.

Developers can now access the tools needed to manage a full-scale Enterprise Ethereum network through Microsoft’s Azure marketplace.

PegaSys is the protocol engineering group at ConsenSys, which in turn is the Brooklyn, New York-based firm known for incubating Ethereum projects. Despite laying off dozens of workers in late April, the firm is looking ahead to further network developments in the blockchain arena.

«We are excited to see the launch of Hyperledger Besu and PegaSys Plus on the Azure Marketplace,» said Yorke E. Rhodes III, principal program manager at Microsoft’s Blockchain Engineering, in a statement to CoinDesk. «Continuing to advance the enterprise quality and tooling for blockchain networks and development is core to serving the needs of customers using Azure.»

​Hyperledger Besu is an open-source Ethereum client written in Java’s programming language. In 2019, it was gifted to Hyperledger, another open-source collaborative blockchain effort hosted by the Linux Foundation.

​PegaSys Plus, the commercial subscription of Hyperledger Besu, offers additional capabilities and support guarantees, while ​PegaSys Orchestrate ​is an Ethereum transaction orchestration system.

An orchestration system is designed to cut down the time and labor eaten up in manual coding by better aligning a business’ data and applications to others. In the case of PegaSys Orchestrate, it enables organizations to build on any Ethereum network by providing functionality to manage transactions, smart contracts and private keys.

ConsenSys has held a strong partnership with Microsoft since the first Visual Studio plug-in for Solidity that the two software companies launched in early 2016.

Both Microsoft and ConsenSys are founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a standards group where finance and other industries explore private versions utilizing Ethereum technology.

Plasma Group to Halt Ethereum Scalability Research, Says It Reached Maturity

The non-profit research organization Plasma Group announced in a Jan. 9 blog post that it would cease studying Ethereum scalability. Identifying funding of public goods as the next key challenge, it pledged to donate its remaining funds to Gitcoin.

Plasma Group was founded in Jan. 2019 with the goal of pushing research toward Ethereum scalability solutions based on Plasma technology. It received funding from a variety of organizations including the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, OmiseGo, Matic Network and Gitcoin.

The non-profit used this money to conduct research into solving practical obstacles for layer-two scaling solutions. The team identified several of its achievements as key, including creating Plasma Cashflow implementations, releasing a generalized Plasma specification and coining Optimistic Rollup.

These served primarily to make Plasma sidechains into fully-fledged blockchains supporting smart contracts, as opposed to just limited money transfer capabilities.

After one year of operation, Plasma Group reached the conclusion that research efforts into Plasma scalability are unneeded, as the theoretical base is mature enough:

“A year ago, scalability research felt like the most pressing need to us, so we threw everything we had into accelerating it. It is amazing to see the multitude of competent teams pushing production plasma into reality now. This shift from research to implementation means that our mission as a research organization must shift as well.”

Public goods funding as the next step

While acknowledging that scalability is still a high priority, the researchers identified the funding of public goods such as open-source software as a key challenge. This follows similar statements by Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin, who included this issue as one of 16 hard problems in blockchain in 2014.

While comprehensive actions to shift Plasma Group’s focus are yet to be revealed, the non-profit announced it would donate the entirety of its funding runway to Gitcoin.

Gitcoin is a crowdfunding platform focusing on the world of open-source development. It offers community-sourced grants to blockchain projects, having previously funded Plasma Group in this manner.

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