Ernst & Young (EY), ConsenSys and Microsoft are coming together to form a protocol which aims to make Ethereum ‘safe and effective’ for enterprise usage.
Making blockchain technologies enterprise-friendly has long been a goal of the industry; the key part being increasing the transaction speed to deal with complex organisational goals. The efforts of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and Foundation aside, Ethereum has so far struggled on this front, although suggestions are that the move to thousands of transactions per second is not far away.
Yet many other stakeholders are joining hands, as the EY and ConsenSys initiative demonstrates. The project, in association with Microsoft, is called the Baseline Protocol. The Ethereum Foundation and EEA are behind this, as they fund the Ethereum-Oasis Project, which is governing the work.
“The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain,” the companies noted.
The theory behind the protocol is sound, aiming to use blockchain technologies as a secure registry and aim to disrupt the long-standing ERP and CRM markets. Failure to synchronise these systems leads to what the companies call ‘value leakage’; missed selling opportunities, lost inventory, not to mention the data breaches and regulatory headaches. Employing the public Ethereum Mainnet as the baseline approach makes sense, the companies say, as it’s always on, companies cannot be locked out or restricted from use, and they only need to pay for what they use.
This is not these three companies’ first time in the saddle: last year saw work undertaken on a supply chain project, codenamed Radish34, which used public Ethereum to enable real-time volume discount calculation across various purchase orders. From this, the Baseline Protocol was born.
“Over the last two years, we have been advancing the state of the art for private, secure transactions on public blockchains,” said Paul Brody, EY global blockchain leader in a statement. “This takes the groundwork we have built and starts filling in gaps such as enterprise directories and private business logic, so companies will be able to run end-to-end processes like procurement with strong security.”
You can find out more about the Baseline Protocol here.
Interested in hearing more in person? John Calian is speaking at Blockchain Expo Global, on March 17-18. Find out more about the Blockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America.