BitPay Brings Bitcore To Microsoft’s Azure BaaS Cloud

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the addition of bitcoin payment processor BitPay to its Azure Blockchain as a service (BaaS) along with three more companies.

BitPay has now announced via blog post that its open source Bitcoin full node and development platform Bitcore is the first Bitcoin service available for Azure users. For running Bitcore, a virtual machine in the cloud requires Node.js, 100GB of disk storage, and at least 4GB of RAM, Silicon Angle reported.

“We built Bitcore to lower the barrier to entry to Bitcoin development. Whether you want to help build Bitcoin's peer to peer network or build better Bitcoin infrastructure for your company, running a full node is the best way to get started”, explained Chris Kleeschulte of BitPay. “Running Bitcore on the Azure cloud will make hosting a node even easier by getting rid of the need for local, dedicated machines.”

Bitcore offers a "comprehensive set" of Node.js language libraries for extending Bitcoin's functionality. It also includes a native set of utilities that enables users to test and develop Bitcoin services without the need to depend on third party APIs for querying the blockchain. This reduces the requirement for trust as well as removes single points of failure for companies running Bitcoin services.

Moreover, Bitcore's API is 20 times faster than connecting to a separate bitcoin node, and orders of magnitude faster than a centralized API, according to the website. 

“That's a significant performance improvement for services that rely on blockchain data, from payment processors and exchanges to block explorers”, Kleeschulte added.