EY to Empower Enterprise with Ethereum Blockchain

Ernst & Young (EY) has disclosed plans to look into deploying Ethereum blockchain for business empowerment.

EY is, however, not the only firm currently considering the potentials embedded in the blockchain sphere for businesses. Deloitte alongside the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently published a white paper analyzing how different blockchains can interact effectively with each other. According to the whitepaper, blockchain today still lacked institution-grade interoperability.

Ernst & Young in its first-ever online enterprise blockchain conference tagged “EY Global Blockchain Summit 2020”, disclosed in detail their work in the public Ethereum space.

EY Global Blockchain Leader, Paul Brody, anchored the 3-day event which ended on April 23. Explaining most of the firm’s ongoing blockchain initiatives. While also disclosing partnerships with tech giants like DELL and Microsoft. Over 50 guests attended the online conference.

Brody, in his keynote speech, threw more light on EY’s journey into the blockchain sphere. He highlighted the firm’s achievements, like the releases of EY OpsChain and EY Blockchain. He also shared his views on blockchain for the future.

In his keynote, Brody pointed out that although private blockchain might be a viable option in the future, currently it was still falling short of expectations. He spoke at length on the issues of scalability and interoperability. In his opinion, these were the major pain points facing private blockchain networks. So, for now, only public blockchain networks were suitable for enterprise interoperability.

Baselining protocol

According to Ernst & Young, the whole idea behind moving from private to the public chain is to eradicate vendor-consortia lock-in. Moreover, it will also help in reducing total ownership cost (TCO) and scale in-network effects.

Notably, EY’s move to public networks is related to the recently launched ‘baseline’ initiative. It aims to support enterprise blockchain usage. It also has the objective of completely eliminating the risk of private and sensitive data leakage. Ethereum will function as a middleman for ‘baselining’. Supported by top blockchain companies like Chainlink, MakerDao, Unibright, Splunk, etc, this is proving to be a remarkable initiative.

Despite the risks, EY is committed to employing Ethereum’s blockchain. Its flagship blockchain project OpsChain version 4.0 is built on the ‘baseline’ protocol.

Blockchain interoperability still a challenge

There are currently hundreds of blockchain networks all over the world. However, most of the decentralized networks find it difficult when it comes to interoperability. According to the WEF whitepaper, blockchain interoperability is still not sufficient enough for enterprise use.

On the current interoperability rate among blockchains, the whitepaper stated, “In public blockchains, interoperability has been in development for many years […]. However, a bigger challenge and, at the same time, a much bigger opportunity exists given interoperability among enterprise-grade permissioned blockchains.”

WEF also pointed out that firms like Cosmos and Polkadot were primarily focusing on improving interoperability. It also maintained no other network had “succeeded in creating interoperability for blockchain platforms other than Bitcoin and Ethereum.”

Previously, we covered Deloitte’s 2018 global blockchain survey and also WEF collaborating with the supply chain and logistics industry to boost blockchain implementation.