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