Why We’re Building Etherprise — Part 2 of 4
This is a 4-part series written by Chad Arimura, CEO, and Jameson Stafford, CMO, about why we are building Etherprise. Part 1 talked about the market landscape, the problems with today’s blockchain networks, and introduced the platform. Part 2 delves deeper into the platform and technology. Finally, parts 3 and 4 close the series out with some use cases and a forward-looking ten-year prediction on where blockchain will have the most impact for the enterprise of tomorrow.
The Technology
We’ve been building and bringing to market enterprise software for a long time. Our recent funded startups, Iron.io and Catalytic, reinforced the need to not only have a strong technical team that can build complex distributed systems, but also a product and design team to make it easy to use, solve the right problems at the right time, and not boiling the ocean with features and functionality before a true understanding of “product market fit”. This is the hardest part. There are a lot of very smart teams with incredible tech solutions, but building a platform and bringing it to market in the real world is much different than building a fancy-sounding whitepaper with algorithms you’ll never understand. Trust us.
Our Platform
As we introduced in part 1 of this 3-part series, the broader market today is either focused on completely public protocols, or private blockchain instances that are deployed in a private cloud or “on prem.” We started with the core philosophy that we need to bring the best of both worlds — the decentralized, immutable, always-on ability of public protocols with the security, privacy, control, and speed of privately-installed blockchains.
So at its core — Etherprise is a blockchain protocol that is mostly Ethereum-compatible (more on that below), that encrypts and secures everything by default. Privacy and access controls will be core to the protocol, and we’ll build it from the ground-up with these features in mind. We’ll create a platform that fits with our decades of experience in enterprise adoption, and we’ll pursue and support proof-of-concept and pilot implementations at many top enterprise companies.
The following are the core features and modules to the Etherprise Platform — namely Blockchain, Access, and Intelligence.
Etherprise Blockchain
The core of the platform is the Etherprise Blockchain, where encryption will be enforced at the protocol level. We believe this will be necessary to win approval from strict enterprise IT departments that can’t tolerate any margin for error. We believe this is also similar to the evolution of interacting with web transactions — in the early days of the internet, very few websites utilized the HTTPS protocol, but today nearly every prominent website is accessed over encrypted HTTPS sessions.
Etherprise will encrypt all smart contract data, and even the code, and provide access through a whitelist to a specific address that can interact with the contract directly. This will provide privacy of the data in the contract, as well as provide protection from hackers looking for vulnerabilities in smart contract execution code. If the user of the blockchain wants to manage keys for their entire organization, they can also use the Etherprise Access (see below).
Etherprise Access
A key management system (KMS) is an integrated approach for generating, distributing and managing cryptographic keys for devices and applications. Etherprise Access is an off-chain Etherprise module that provides the ability for users of the Etherprise protocol to manage keys for large organizations allowing issuance and revocation of keys easily.
Etherprise Access also provides role-based access control, or RBAC, for smart contracts to make it easy for companies to manage access rights to their smart contracts running on the blockchain. This means that you can restrict access at the core blockchain level rather than depending on the smart contract developers to write security into every single contract. This will provide a much higher level of security than exists today.
Etherprise Intelligence
Enterprises must have auditability over the actions against the blockchain. Etherprise Intelligence logs every interaction with the blockchain so that they can know when an activity happened, what exactly happened and who did it. This includes read-only events that don’t change data too, which typically would not be written to the blockchain itself. Once logged, the data is accessible through the Etherprise Management Dashboard for complete visibility into what’s going on within the Etherprise blockchain.
Interoperability
As mentioned above, interoperability is critical to the growth of the market as a whole. There is fragmentation in the marketplace, and as an industry we risk slowing the overall growth and adoption of blockchain if we don’t address interoperability up front. To this end, we are fully committed to the growth and health of the Ethereum community, as well as the GoChain community and technology core — as that is the underlying codebase in which we are building the Etherprise Platform.
Ethereum Compatibility
Ethereum is the gold standard for DApp development — used by 90% of DApps and DApp developers. It’s a great and growing ecosystem, with many existing tools, and it’s been proven to work for over 3 years. We feel that a large degree of compatibility with this platform is essential to foster rapid adoption. Etherprise will allow developers that are used to developing for Ethereum to use the same tools and contract code they already use, but deploy it to a privacy-focused blockchain.
GoChain Interoperability
We saw a huge gap in the blockchain ecosystem with plenty of projects focused just on transactions (the currency part) and some focused on smart contracts and DApps, but no public networks that have private smart contracts and enterprise grade security. Public networks like Ethereum are perfect for many things, in particular public ownership of assets like tokens, company shares, real estate and virtual kitties, but they can’t be used for a lot of use cases that require privacy. The existing public networks allow anyone to easily read the data stored on the blockchain and anyone can attempt to interact with a smart contract. For business uses cases like payroll, sales commissions, the lead up to a real-estate transfer, and b2b contracts, you simply can’t use a public, transparent network unless you want the world to know every detail.
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
A final word on interoperability is the importance of continual feedback and input from the global 1000 enterprises looking to adopt blockchain. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is the perfect place to listen and help shape the future of blockchain, and Etherprise will be joining as a member very soon. Look for more news about our involvement with the EEA.
Thanks for reading part 2 of this 3-part series on why we’re building Etherprise. In the next part, we’ll go deeper into the industry use cases of Etherprise, along with a 10-year projection of blockchain across the enterprise landscape!
Stay tuned!
Chad and Jameson
Join Us in Helping Bring Blockchain to Enterprise!
We are at the forefront of a massive change in the way enterprises transact with each other, and Etherprise exists to address the gaps in security, privacy, control, and speed necessary for this change to happen. With Etherprise, Enterprises can start using blockchain immediately while not worrying about the complicated installation and setup of private chains.
We’re hiring as fast as we can find great team members to join the mission of bringing blockchain to the enterprise. Check out our jobs page for current open roles, and don’t hesitate to jump into our Telegram channel to say hi!
Learn more about Etherprise at https://etherprise.io
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