(Commonwealth Union)_Paul Brody, the blockchain head at one of the Big Four accounting firms Ernst & Young (EY), told Decrypt at this year’s Messari Mainnet symposium that his organization is “all in on public blockchains.” He recalled EY’s engagement with cryptocurrency and emphasized that the company was one of the industry’s early adopters in the traditional banking sector.
To focus on work on public blockchains, EY established a blockchain division in 2015. It used to operate with private blockchains as well, but Brody told Decrypt that has “significantly reduced over the years.”
A smart contract testing tool created by EY’s security team in Israel, a system called EY Ops Chain that uses tokenization for traceability and transparency within supply chains, and a Zero Knowledge (ZK) Optimistic Layer 2 Rollup for reasonably priced transaction privacy for businesses make up the company’s internal toolkit at the moment.
This latter tool was converted into Polygon Nightfall and donated to the public domain.
Brody attributed EY’s early cryptocurrency adoption to senior leadership’s conviction in the potential of blockchain technology. According to Brody, “This will be the future route for the majority of business-to-business interactions, and we need to know more than just a little bit about it.” “We must commit fully.”
According to Brody, audits make up about 65% of EY’s blockchain activity.
NFT tools, food traceability, and increasing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are all part of the larger portion of the pie. Brody added that the business is developing a marketplace for carbon offsets and carbon tracking tools.
“A recurring pattern we observe is that businesses first like to test the waters with something straightforward. Over time they move up to more substantive activities: issuing assets, selling products and services, establishing DeFi tools, which for a bank can entail selling Bitcoin and to clients,” he said, adding that in my opinion, it is a slippery slope.
Brody concluded by talking in-depth on how the current bear market affects EY’s blockchain division and pointing out that its clients in the financial services industry are genuinely concerned about the significant price swings. They still consider the volatility “a feature, not a bug,” he continued. However, the clients in the industry are very diverse. The price of gas and the network’s scalability, not the asset’s price, are what matter to them because “they view Ethereum as a public infrastructure for computing and business activities.”
Brody added that despite what clients may occasionally request, EY has adopted a “very hard line” against private blockchains and proprietary technology. Additionally, this increases the company’s enthusiasm for Ethereum. “We decided to just build on Ethereum since it was a very smart move. My engineering budget is modest. I want us to dominate Ethereum, the world’s largest market, not just be mediocre at 20 other things. The best on earth,” proclaimed Brody. “How long before my rivals follow this tactic? I wish for a very, very long time.”
