In 2015 the Ethereum public mainnet was launched, and private blockchain offerings started. This allowed the entrance of companies focused on collaboration, funding long-overdue digitization efforts, and extending business processes across corporate borders.
Today, efforts to make blockchain technology enterprise-friendly divide the community into public networks and private networks. The dichotomy was wrong from the start, since it was believed that public blockchain networks were not to be used in confidential business operations and that private networks were safe.
A Wrong Belief and a Dangerous One
A private blockchain’s consensus mechanism can make it difficult to manipulate information, unless the companies maintaining the ledger agree to do so. However, these networks are not really safe against data breaches because they need to protect many identical copies.
Despite hacking, not everyone in a consortium should know about every transaction or agreement operated in that network, even among a restricted number of permissioned partners. Private platforms like Hyperledger Fabric try to compartmentalize information inside a permissioned network, but blockchain technology was not designed for that purpose.
Consequently, an immense amount of complexity is added, which hinders security. Fortunately, blockchain technology can reduce system integration complexity, increase security, and improve both resilience and interoperability. Besides, companies are not required to replace internal systems or build “consortium blockchains.”
Enterprise blockchain must face these problems: the need for information transparency across business networks to improve outcomes like food safety and reduce fraud, and the need for information compartmentalization to ensure privacy and encourage companies to participate.
A Common Challenge
If a company stored all its private information on a blockchain, anyone would see it and would have access to the code for business agreements between different companies. That would allow them to reveal sensitive strategies, tactics and relationships to other network participants, even if the information is encrypted.
It is necessary to pass messages between functions running on separate systems, so that underlying data or business logic are not exposed indiscriminately. Publishing messages to a common bulletin board, a magic message bus, is a classic pattern for making system integration more manageable and resilient.
The Ethereum mainnet is used as a global integration axis serving systems that work together without revealing private information, even to partners. Paul Brody, global blockchain leader of Ernst & Young, explains that joining a company’s private blockchain involves linking to its wholesalers, suppliers, shippers, insurance company, and even its bank.
A mainnet like Ethereum 2.0 will enable creating, combining and recombining business integrations, just like workgroups and channels on Slack. An SAP inventory management system, a supplier’s ERP system, and a fintech partner’s blockchain can work together consistently and repeatedly without having to establish a new infrastructure to accommodate each set of partners.
Those Working on It
Firms like Microsoft and Ernst & Young, and projects like Chainlink and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Trusted Compute working group, are already in the lead.
The recently released Trusted Compute specification will allow querying a manufacturer, identifying a problem with a production cycle, and being confident that answers are based on information generated by systems free from manipulation – without exposing private data.
The Nightfall project, developed by Ernst & Young, uses the mainnet to post cryptographic proofs for system integration and compliance. This firm uses the public mainnet, which is reflected in its volumes and confirms that the mainnet can be used in business.
By Willmen Blanco
