Why We’re Building Etherprise — Part 3 of 4
This is a 4-part series written by Chad Arimura, CEO, and Jameson Stafford, CMO, about why we are building Etherprise. In part 1, we talked about the market landscape, the problems with today’s blockchain networks, and introduces the platform. Part 2 dove deeper into the platform and technology. In this part 3, we investigate some real-world enterprise and privacy-centric use cases, and how we envision Etherprise’s role in future solutions. Finally, in an upcoming part 4 we close out the series with a forward-looking ten-year prediction on where blockchain will have the most impact for the enterprise of tomorrow.
Etherprise: Ethereum for Enterprise
If you haven’t guessed yet from our name, Etherprise is the power and vision of Ethereum realized for the Enterprise. As we discussed in the last 2 parts of this blog series, the missing key features of blockchain holding back enterprise pilot projects are privacy, security, control, and speed. Since Etherprise delivers these elements, this opens up a plethora of use cases and new ways of transacting business.
While there are numerous use cases to be found for public, transparent blockchains such as Ethereum or GoChain, large companies or DApp developers who require privacy are often unable to achieve all their goals and realize full adoption without the set of features and modules discussed in part 2. Here are just a few of the use cases we’ve heard or discussed with potential users of Etherprise:
Supply Chain
Supply chain often involves thousands of complex steps performed by numerous independent companies as they move goods and materials around the globe. These companies rely on each other for detailed manifests, real-time logistics information, and clear line of responsibility in order to perform effectively in a hyper-competitive, just-in-time industry. The difficulty all these companies face is that in a traditional technology environment systems are centralized, closed and proprietary. Errors or failures to disclose relevant data can result in delays that can cost money, jobs, or in some cases ruin entire businesses.
While traditional public blockchain offers a great solution to the centralization problem, supply chain also requires a degree of privacy of data and enterprise access controls. Companies like Maersk, with $35 billion in revenue and 90,000 employees can’t simply expose critical shipping data and hand a private key over to some guy in the shipping department. They deal with complex contractual relationships between companies in the supply chain, and often deal with very real threats from hijackers and pirates while transporting valuable goods through some of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Etherprise solves many of these problems by enabling each company in the supply chain to permit their employees to interact with a secure, encrypted smart contract that cannot be manipulated or falsified. Manifest data can be shared by all parties via a single, immutable source of truth, and never exposed to malicious 3rd parties. Origin, waypoints and destinations can be stored in an encrypted smart contract and accessed by employees with proper access to plan, deliver or receive goods. In essence, Etherprise becomes the true, decentralized backbone of the supply chain.
Healthcare
If you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, you know how painful it is deal with the inability of doctors to share your patient data due to strict privacy laws — even if those laws exist to protect you. These restrictions result in fragmented, out of date, unreliable data stored in various forms and locations around town, or around the world. To date there has been no secure way for patients to own their own data across multiple locations without substantial risk of loss or data theft.
Hospital systems and health-related DApps using the Etherprise blockchain protocol have the potential to transform healthcare, placing the patient at the center of the ecosystem and increasing the security, privacy, and interoperability of health data. With data stored on Etherprise, patients can ultimately own their medical records in a secure and private fashion, share them on-demand with medical providers, and revoke access when no longer in use — ensuring data is only accessed when needed, and will never be tampered with.
Personally Identifiable Information
Also known as PII, this includes things like name, address, email, phone, date of birth, social security number, passport, driver’s license, biometrics, or any other single point or combination of data that can identify you as an individual. This type of information is used almost daily to transact with many of the largest companies in the world, many of which have had recent data breaches. Once these companies have your data, they typically hold onto it forever, inviting it to fall prey to internal or external bad actors. The European GDPR standard has taken steps to provide mechanisms to remove your data, but it’s not universal, subject to lack of enforcement, and highly complex and cumbersome to invoke.
Using the Etherprise blockchain, individuals can control their own data via a secure, decentralized, accessible source, and grant and revoke access to that data as needed. Corporations and DApps can take action on this data in order to conduct business, while keeping sensitive PII private, secure, immutable, and verifiable to both the business, and the individual. Then when it’s time to revoke the data per GDPR policy, both the business and the individual are in control.
Insurance Claims
Insurance companies spend over $2 billion each year on fraud and compliance. They oftentimes use networks of outside providers during the error-prone process, and there are many steps in the complex process of insuring individuals and businesses. Trust is at the center of this $5 trillion industry, but is at an all-time low. Blockchain is part of a solution that helps add transparency and trust to the process through transparent, immutable ledgers. Smart contracts can be used to automate the data entry and payout of claims in a way that can reduce both inefficiencies and fraud. This is where Etherprise comes in.
Etherprise could allow these various providers to instantly enter data into a timestamped immutable blockchain, while ensuring that sensitive data is kept private. Smart contracts built on Etherprise could help automate and fulfill claims while keeping the logic and data behind them private yet verifiable.
Private Financial Exchange
Private exchange is just that — the exchange of money or other assets without revealing the sender, receiver, or amounts exchanged. The most obvious application here is payroll. The idea of an “open-book policy” is nice in theory, where every employee knows what every other employee is making, but the reality is 99.9% of businesses want to keep salary, payroll, and bonuses private between the employee, and employer. The employer can run its entire payroll on the blockchain, paying out in any form of currency whether fiat or crypto, using smart contracts as the basis for a completely transparent and immutable structure — but only between each employee and the employer, not everyone sitting around you as well. The organization can use Etherprise to provide role-based access to each employee where needed.
Affiliate Programs
A more business-oriented example is affiliate program commissions. Take the Amazon Associates program which pays 10% for purchases made from anyone who clicks an ad on your website. With Etherprise, the contracts could be put on the blockchain and payments made directly through the contract. Most people don’t want the world to know how much affiliate money they are making and Amazon definitely does not want the world to know how much it’s paying either. Etherprise would allow them to transact with each other in a way that both parties, Amazon and the Associate, are the only ones that can see what’s going on between them, yet have a 100% verifiable, immutable record of what’s been transacted between them.
Real Estate
And to take it one step further, a good example of a system that could use both a public and private chain is a real estate transaction. In a real estate transaction, you have a bunch of moving parts and a bunch of parties involved. You have real estate agents, lawyers, title companies, banks, inspectors, and the two parties on opposite sides of the transaction. Then between these various parties, different parts of the transactions happen that include escrow, mortgage, title transfers, commission to the agents, and a bunch of other things, but we’ll use these main things for this example. The majority of this stuff should be private while the actual title transfer is public, ie: the ownership of the real estate.
Etherprise enables all the private parts of this scenario with interoperability between GoChain for the public title transfer. A contract could be made for the escrow and once it’s fulfilled, it pays out to the seller and/or the bank. Then another contract for the mortgage would be made between the bank and the buyer which would fulfill the entire mortgage. Nobody wants people to know how much mortgage they have on their house, nor does the bank want people to know how much it is handing out in mortgage. Once the mortgage is fulfilled, the contract would kick off the title contract again to remove any liens/remove bank from ownership
The Path to True Enterprise Adoption
We’re only at the beginning of the Etherprise journey, and already we’re sounding like a broken record. Blockchain is here to stay, it has the potential to change the way businesses transact with consumers and each other, but lacks the privacy, security, control, and speed necessary for widespread adoption. Etherprise aims to solve for these gaps in the blockchain through its founding teams vast experience in bringing successful enterprise-focused companies and technologies to market.
Stay tuned for our predictions in enterprise blockchain in a bonus post #4 coming tomorrow. They were long enough to warrant their own post!
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!
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