Microsoft, EY and ConsenSys Initiates Public Ethereum Blockchain for Enterprises


Global taxation and transaction advisory
firm EY announced its open-sourced Baseline protocol.
The group will leverage the public Ethereum
Mainnet to connect internal systems of the businesses for resource planning
which is being called the Baseline Protocol.
The baseline protocol includes the
Tokenization platform build for Enterprises in association with the Ethereum
blockchain network. More specifically, the protocol has been funded by the
Ethereum foundation and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
The baseline has been founded by EY along
with Microsoft and ConsenSys. It has been developed in corporation with several
major crypto companies including Chainlink, Unibright, MakerDAO, Splunk, and
AMD among others. Each of the involved company has been contributing technically
or strategically to this initiative.
The platform code has been made available
to a few selected invitees and will see a public launch somewhere in April.
Press Releases by EY and ConsenSys
In the press release by EY Paul Brody, EY
Global blockchain leader said,
“Over the last two years, we have been
advancing the state of the art for private, secure transactions on public
blockchains. 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.”
John Wolpert, ConsenSys Group Executive for
Enterprise Mainnet stated,
“A lot of people think of blockchains as
the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Main net as
Middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the mainnet is good at while
avoiding what it's not good at.”
How the Baseline Protocol will
function?
In private blockchain networks, some of the
benefits of blockchains are minimized due to its centralized nature.
Enterprises which want to evade these private blockchains, come across certain
challenge regarding compliance and regulatory restrictions and the threat of
private data breach among competitors and the public.
Previously the enterprises were leveraging
the public blockchain networks mostly as a settlement layer, where they would
store the final phase of their transactions. And now with the Baseline protocol
initiative, the public blockchain will be utilized as middleware and not as a
settlement layer by using the Zero-knowledge tools which ensure the privacy of
the data.
Zero-Knowledge Tools and Data storage
privacy
The baseline protocol will support
tokenization and decentralized financial services on the mainnet baseline
integrating with zero knowledge tools, off-chain storage and decentralized
identity to secure the data, assets or any other activity from being exposed.
The platform will tokenize blockchain applications that connect supply chain monitoring with commerce and financial services. It will support tokenization standards and will assist to shift the private networks to public blockchain networks.
Enterprises that want to move from private
networks towards the public blockchain network will be highly benefitted from
this project. The initiative will pass through several technical evaluations
and will have to comply with cost analysis and risk management framework models.

Jayashree Ingle
CBW - External Analyst
INDIA