Consulting Giant EY Adopts Ethereum for Creating Immutable Contracts
Ernst and Young has successfully implemented a blockchain application which till now was mostly used inside Web3 space.
The company has launched OpsChain, an on-chain contract manager based on Ethereum. The application helps business secure agreements with clients or internal teams when working on a project of confidential nature. As per EY, the OpsChain application has been developed for anyone to use. However, no official figures on pricing has been provided.
EY had also notified that they would be utilizing Zero Knowledge technology for their OpsChain application. Zero Knowledge solutions such as rollups would help reduce the cost of using the application by a huge margin.
Why did EY Choose Ethereum?
The primary rationale for selecting a public blockchain over a private one was its enhanced security. Ethereum has more than 1.3 million validators which work tirelessly throughout the clock to verify transactions and secure the blockchain.
Note: The contracts which would be written on Ethereum would probably be recorded as smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed in a similar way as a regular blockchain transaction, albeit at a higher cost.
Also, as EY plans to use Zero Knowledge solutions, probably to keep costs under check, the recent upgrades in Ethereum would be highly beneficial.
Just last month, in March 2023, Ethereum implemented its much awaited Dencun Upgrade. The upgrade helped Ethereum reduce the cost of creating rollups by introducing a solution called the "blobs".
Blobs are temporary spaces in a blockchain that is used to summarize a block of transactions and verify the entire block at once instead of verifying individual transactions. Each blob stores data from about 18 days. This way, costs are kept at a check and the speed of transactions can be boosted.
As EY proposes to use these blobs, they can provide much greater security than any off-chain Zero Knowledge solution such as Layer-2 networks. Also, the speed of transactions would be much higher.
Something You Should Know About Legal Use of Smart Contracts
As per a report by Zion Market Research, the global market for on-chain legal contracts could reach $10 billion by 2030. The core reasons being their reliability, security and the immutability, all of which make them more trustable than paper documents which could easily be forged.
The smart contract market (which includes applications such as legal contracts) is expected to have a staggering growth rate of 24.6% per annum. Top players including Ripple and Ethereum, have played a key role in developing them to greater heights.
Though other players such as Oracle, IBM, AWS and TCS are active in these markets, yet crypto native solution providers like Ethereum, Ripple, Avalanche and others remain a top choice.
Would Others Follow?
There shouldn't be any doubt that these solutions would be quickly adopted by other players in the market. However, being a new technology for many, we expect a linear adoption curve.
Ripple has also been developing escrow services which are based on blockchain. Many such services are also based on smart contracts.
Adopting blockchain technology for our daily lives had been a dream of several web3 companies and slowly this dream has now come to reality. We expect higher adoption rates in the future but that would definitely nee some regulatory clarity.