By Daniel C. Burnett, EEA Executive Director
Recently, I sent an email to all members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) outlining my intention to explore a new direction for our organization.
This decision is a direct response to what we see as a profound and very exciting evolution of the Ethereum ecosystem as a global business platform. Because this evolution has significant implications not only for us but for the wider business community, I wanted to share some of these thoughts with the general public in this blog post.
The Decentralized Future Is Here
As I wrote to our members, when the EEA was established in 2017, our focus was primarily on Enterprise Ethereum, which refers to a private consortium-based blockchain model. This reflected the state of public Ethereum technology at the time, which was unable to provide the levels of privacy, authorization, and performance required for business use cases. These are what we call “the three Ps” and they are essential.
Fast forward to today and the landscape has changed dramatically. The Ethereum mainnet has evolved into Layer 1 of the world’s most powerful, trusted, and widely used blockchain. A broad ecosystem of Layer 2, service providers, and other contributors has grown around it, providing powerful solutions for the “3Ps” your business needs.
This lays the foundation for what we can call “mainstreaming decentralization.” I have long believed that these developments will have a profound impact on the business world.
Above all, viable decentralized business models built on public blockchains enable high levels of disintermediation, trustless transactions, radical transparency, tokenization of all tangible and intangible assets, new opportunities in decentralized finance, and new possibilities for automation. It will allow range. It’s a business process, but potentially a process for the entire business.
For anyone who follows blockchain, none of these ideas are new. What is new is immediacy. Not all the pieces are falling into perfect alignment yet, but I think it’s fair to say that the decentralized future is here for those who want to take advantage of it.
Ask the right questions
To take advantage of its benefits, companies must understand the principles of decentralization and how to apply them to specific situations. This means asking yourself a number of important questions.
Here are some examples:
Decentralization removes the need for intermediaries in various business processes, enabling more efficient and cost-effective operations through trustless transactions. As a business, how can you leverage this in your specific market? What are the new possibilities for disintermediary business coordination that can help increase efficiency? And how should you respond if your business model is based on acting as an intermediary?
The transparency inherent in public blockchains can provide businesses with an immutable, auditable trace of all transactions. This level of transparency can improve trust with customers and stakeholders. How can you leverage this with your customers and suppliers? And what does this mean for business models built on information asymmetry?
In the EEA, we are asking ourselves these same questions.
From the beginning, our mission has been to help businesses “onboard” into the Ethereum world. This mission is more important than ever, but supporting a business in a decentralized public blockchain world is a different prospect than supporting a business in a private blockchain world.
As ecosystems evolve, we evolve with them. And keep doing that. As I wrote to our members, I will be spending a lot of time in the coming months talking to people and organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem to get their input on the most pressing needs of our ecosystem today and where we want to go next.
These types of discussions about the implications of a changing environment are always important. I think that’s especially important in the present moment. I would like to encourage companies interested in blockchain to do the same.
New vistas offered by public blockchains are opening up. We all have to see where they lead.