My new world view — helping make Ethereum a household word

Paul DiMarzio
Nov 6 · 8 min read

My new world view: helping make Ethereum a household word

Around the middle of 2019, I was looking around for my next professional challenge. After having spent time working with most of the leading blockchain platforms while at Digital Asset and IBM I knew in my heart that it was time to give Ethereum a try (why? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to always follow the developers!). But when the offer came in to join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, I wasn’t sure — having been product-focused for my entire career, did I really want to sign on with a non-profit industry standards organization? It didn’t take long at EEA to realize that I made the right decision. Here’s my story, and a glimpse into what EEA is doing to make a difference.

What would you give up for a month rather than lose Wi-Fi access?

I don’t do anything without research, and while I was researching the value of industry orgs, in general, I came across the results of a curious poll conducted in 2016, where 1,500 U.S. adult smartphone users were asked what they would be willing to give up for a month rather than lose Wi-Fi access. The answers covered pretty much the entire range of life’s indulgences and pleasures, including wine, fast food, coffee, sex, friends, a partner, and showers. Thinking about how ubiquitous Wi-Fi had become in our lives, I could see where they would value it over some of the items in this list (coffee — never!).

But I’m old enough to remember a time when it wasn’t this way.

My new home — 2000

Back in 2000, I was having my new family home built and I wanted it to be totally connected for data, voice, and video. So, one particularly freezing weekend during construction my pal and I ran 40 cables through the shell — two Cat 5 and two RG6 runs to twenty locations throughout the house (I really didn’t know where my connected devices would be, so most rooms had two runs in different areas). It was a real nightmare! But Wi-Fi at the time was not an option — it was unreliable, and support mainly limited to laptops. Being a laptop-wielding traveler in those days I can attest to the difficulty of actually connecting in those cases where a signal was available because of a lack of interoperability among different vendors’ equipment.

Although the IEEE had come up with a great technical standard (the original 802.11), as a Standards Developing Organization (SDO) they had no mission — and therefore no ability — to test product compliance to their standard. And so, any manufacturer could claim they were compliant or compatible with the spec, but reality showed that very few would have passed an actual certification test.

Technology stewardship needs to be matched with market stewardship

These days all but three of those wires are used — to feed the three wireless access points that envelope my home in a blanket of Wi-Fi that ‘just works’. What turned things around?

Just as I was building my house, an organization formed by a variety of players in the wireless industry — the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance — was just getting on its feet. Now known more appropriately as the Wi-Fi Alliance, this organization had the business savvy needed to convert the exceptional engineering of the IEEE into a technology with web-scale adoption.

Their formula was simple. First, use an understanding of what customers really want and derive an industry perspective from the work of the SDOs; with this industry perspective in mind, develop additional specifications as necessary to fill any gaps. Second, guarantee through certification programs that the products of member organizations would interoperate. It’s this combination of market-driven specifications and certification testing that ultimately drove the web-scale adoption of Wi-Fi, making it a household word and something that people value more than their morning cup of joe.

Of course, the Wi-Fi Alliance was not the only industry organization to make a market out of SDO specs. WiMAX Forum, 3GPP, Bluetooth Special Interest Group, and the Open Connectivity Foundation are similar examples from other industries. What I learned from this is that technology stewardship needs to be matched with market stewardship to bring the market for a new technology to life. Without such a transition from technical innovation to market receptivity, even the most ground-breaking technology will remain limited to a small cadre of enthusiasts and likely never achieve web-scale adoption.

What would you give up for a month rather than lose Ethereum mainnet access?

Sorry to say, but Ethereum is no-where near the tipping point of achieving this sort of adoption. Whenever I would discuss this job opportunity with anyone — even my tech-savvy colleagues — I was met with blank stares.

Them: So, what’s the job about?

Me: A technology called Ethereum.

Them: What?

Me: Have you ever heard of blockchain?

Them: Oh, maybe. I think so.

Me: Have you ever heard of Bitcoin?

Them: Oh yeah!!!

Me: Well, it’s sorta something like that, but way better.

Them (hesitatingly): Oh…. Cool.

And my friends only knew about Bitcoin due to all the stories of drug lords, kidnappers, and cyber-criminals that were being put out steadily by the press — not from personal experience.

Yup, the EEA was where I needed to be!!

So, Paul, can you net out what the EEA is all about?

Just like those other organizations that raised their target markets to new levels of mass adoption, the EEA was formed by stakeholders in the Ethereum community to do the same. We have a very diverse membership, drawing from organizations in the private sector (large and small, technology providers and technology consumers), government, academics, and civil society at large. In the EEA everyone has an equal voice. This allows us to develop a neutral, competitive, and credible market view.

Our vision, of course, is to empower enterprise Ethereum services everywhere for everyone. What do I mean by ‘enterprise’ Ethereum? It’s simply the use of Ethereum (the public mainnet or private permissioned networks) for business activities such as commerce, exchange, and trade. That’s it! We have a three-prong strategy for achieving that vision:

1. Achieve a commercially viable global ecosystem for all by publishing an open standards-based architecture and market-driven technical specifications

2. Build trust in services and solutions credentialed by EEA through cost-effective and timely testing and certification processes

3. Establish Ethereum as the worldwide market leader for enterprise blockchain solutions by heavily promoting the brand and technology

The core of the EEA architecture stack relies on the formal definition of the Ethereum protocol as published in the Yellow Paper, and core technologies that have been added to the mainnet since. Through open, member-driven workgroups, specs for additional capabilities demanded by the enterprise market are then layered on top. We have two published specifications to date: the EEA Client Specification, and the EEA Off-Chain Trusted Compute Specification.

Although the EEA produces specs, not code, I find it interesting that code adhering to EEA specs is increasingly being adopted by Hyperledger as new projects. The Ethereum client formerly known as Pantheon was contributed to Hyperledger by PegaSys and is now the Besu project. Similarly, a coded example of the Trusted Compute spec has been accepted by Hyperledger as the Avalon project. I think that this combination of specs and spec-based open source code can only help accelerate the market.

Although not quite ready for the public yet, all of the EEA’s specifications will be backed by a certification testing program designed to give consumers confidence that EEA-certified products deliver the interoperability they need, and capabilities they want. This is a core tenet of the EEA’s mandate. Look for this to become available sometime in 2020.

And marketing is, well, marketing!

Riding the magic bus

When the EEA was first formed, our members were focused on private, permissioned Ethereum networks for any sort of business opportunity. At the time the public Ethereum mainnet had, to put it kindly, a less than stellar perception as a business-friendly place. The three key deficiencies cited were in the areas of the ‘Three Ps’: privacy, permissioning, and performance. Everyone felt the need to conduct business in a locked-down space, and the current EEA specifications are mainly focused on addressing the three Ps.

But we think there’s a shift occurring in how people perceive Ethereum as a place for conducting business. Certainly, the impending shift towards Ethereum 2.0 technologies is helping here — but also there are an increasing number of enterprises doing just fine on the public mainnet. And so, the EEA has joined forces with the Ethereum Foundation and other groups to begin examining mainnet updates that would be beneficial to the enterprise. My colleague from EEA member ConsenSys calls the mainnet the ‘Magic Bus’ — a place where both business and peer-to-peer transactions can intermingle safely.

Private networks won’t disappear — so we will continue writing specs for them — but I see an inevitable shift of some percentage of work towards the public mainnet, with strong, seamless connectivity between public and private deployments. Very much along the lines of how intranets co-exist with the public Internet today.

Hello, I’m Paul, and I’m here to help

I had the chance to present my story to a large group of Ethereum developers at Devcon 5 in Osaka this month — barely two months into the job! There was a lot of acceptance of what we’re doing, it was an exciting conference, and I’m now certain that I made the right decision!

My job as Director of Community for the EEA is to help make sure that all the various communities we serve know what we’re doing and have a chance to have their voices heard. I’m trying to make myself as easy to find as possible, here are some places you can engage me in dialog. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little piece and I look forward to working with you to the point where Ethereum is as important as wine, sex, and showers to the average consumer!

· Paul.DiMarzio@entethalliance.org

· @PaulD360 on Twitter

· @PTDiMarzio on Telegram

Paul DiMarzio

Written by

Paul currently serves as Director of Community for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

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