decrypt.co
Thanks to a new one-click deployment feature, Microsoft Azure Marketplace customers can now quickly integrate the Space and Time blockchain data warehouse with their existing enterprise infrastructure.
Launched as part the "Startup with Chainlink" initiative that supports the development of Web3 startups, the Space and Time leverages the Chainlink price oracle platform along with other sources to pull data from blockchain protocols, decentralized application (dapps), and off-chain systems with a goal of delivering enterprise-grade use cases to smart contract applications.
Space and Time raised $20 million in a strategic funding round led by Microsoft’s M12 fund last year, meaning that the company also enjoys unique access to artificial intelligence (AI) solutions as Azure is an exclusive provider of cloud services to OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed AI research laboratory best known for its popular ChatGPT service.
“The need for verifiable data across blockchains, enterprises and AI has never been more important,” said Space and Time CEO and co-founder Nate Holiday in a statement accompanying the news. “We provide enterprises with the ability to integrate blockchain data into their applications and business processes, which is critical for both customer growth and enabling responsible data stewards.”
Provided free of charge, the company’s hybrid transactional and analytic data warehouse comes pre-loaded with real-time indexed blockchain data, giving Azure customers a way to easily access, manage and perform analytics on blockchain-native data without sacrificing compute power or security.
Additionally, it allows users to feed verifiable data into AI models for training, further expanding the capabilities of the AI tech.
What is Space and Time?
Space and Time is Web3-native data platform that seeks to bridge enterprise data assets with blockchain and AI innovation through a protocol called Proof of SQL—a novel form of cryptography designed to prove that query computation was done accurately and that both the query and the data are verifiably tamper proof.
According to the team, the protocol can be applied to various areas of Web3, including decentralized finance (DeFi), where it promises to enable new, complex financial instruments to be created on-chain, and GameFi, allowing end-game results and in-game events to be directly queryable by smart contracts.
Space and Time’s integration with Azure also means that Microsoft’s cloud computing service, which already supports a host of other blockchain solutions, is one step closer to becoming a go-to cloud platform for building Web3 projects—an important development for the fast-evolving industry.