Io Builders at the EEA Face2Face meeting in Lisbon
1 year after our first attendance to an EEA meeting in NY, we have being part of a new in person collaboration meeting. The EEA is doing a hard and tough but needed work, creating a standard ethereum enterprise architecture specification , and all the surrounding topics. The hot and most important topic, is to create a technical and a client specification,that allows an interoperable client spec, where any enterprise can choose the vendor of their will, being part of the same network. The golden goal( and we are step by step closer), is to be able to have at the same network, Clearmatics. Quorum, Blockapps and Pantheon clients, that run smoothly with the same source of truth, configuration and standards. At this moment, you could ask yourself, why is not parity mentioned on this group? Parity is not on the working groups, and seems to have another strategy, not aligned with the EEA.
Client spec is not the only theme , overall architecture, guidance is also on the workstream.
Some Context and intro about how the technical specification works
To go deeper in how the specification is been done, there is a main technical specification workgroup, which is working on the client spec , overall architecture and guidance, trying to bring it step by step further. EEA has people with deep experience on specifications, standards, that having worked on W3C workforces, that make the life easier. Meetings are scheduled on a weekly basis, having to timeframes, enabling all participants timezones.
Vendors have a big responsibility on these meetings and workgroups, having in mind the customers, their needs, and work together on a standard that bring the vision of interoperability. to reality. We as customers, have an important duty too, which is collaborating with the vendors, workgroups, to share our needs and push for functionalities, prioritizing them and being one of the drivers of the specification.
Think about how hard it is, as vendors, to shape their roadmaps, product vision, trying to fit and work on the specification. One can have already developed things in one way, and others in another kind of approach, and they need to converge having in mind the community needs. Having seen 1 year evolution, things are going in the right direction, there is progress and new players like pantheon, are bringing new ideas, and fast track topics, having learnt from the early players.
Added to this work stream, there are others trying focus on other important topics, trusted execution environment, token classification, etc
Finally, and not less important, there are several workgroups, trying to have common visions of this amazing technology stack, applied or focused on given contexts, markets…finance, legal, supply chain, AI, insurance, real state,…. EEA has the responsibility to bring value to its members.
Main topics discussed
After sharing some context, lets focus on the main topics that have been discussed.
The hot topic of this meeting has been overall permissioning topic, either at network, node, consortium, participant, organization level. First of all, there is a need to identity all the roles part of the execution, an responsibility chain, to have an ubiquitous language, and then decide which is the reference implementation to follow depending on the context.
The second and with similar importance are Consensus algorithms, and which ones must be supported as standard on the clients. Clique seems the moset easy to include now on the spec, having known that its not commonly used on production environments due non instant finality ( has forks) , and non deterministic algorithm behaviour. Added to this not all vendors have it implemented, perhaps it is being used on several ethereum testnets, like the new Goerli tesnet and Rinkeby. (Kovan uses Aura). Instant finality is really needed, and Clique is a PBFT alfgoritm, more close to POW. We need to push to have an BFT algorithm, and all agree that IBFT is the choice. The challenge is to standarize and make a spec over IBFT, having known that every vendor has its own implementation. Maybe IBFT 2.0 and Roberto Saltini’s paper is a good start point.
At Io Builders, as being part as core comitters, of the Alastria and LacChain consortiums, and with the experience on our venture development process, we really know the pain of governance on such scenarios, bringing alife a network. Having an on chain node and in extension account permissioning, is like water on the dessert (perhaps having already built custom models to bypass the current vendors offer). Think about how is daily life when you have 400 nodes to on board and manage, on a given network, all based on a common permissioned_nodes.json. It’s a close to a hitchcock film. Pantheon is bringing a new solution on the table on version 1.1 on April, that we are embracing soon, after already working on 1.0 on our internal iobuilders deployments. Let’s see what other vendors bring. We have being working for a long time with Quorum and is time to use others. Nowadays Pantheon looks very good and works fine. Let’s see if JpMorgans Quorum reacts, and brings more value, a real opensource mindset on the table, avoiding thoughts of a hidden agenda.
Other parts of the agenda have been trusted execution envs, performance and testing networks ( will be hard to make it happen, without interoperable clients), Public ethereum compatibility, prccompiles, genesis file, different github issues raised over the spec, etc
Next Steps
Version 3 specification is on the way to be released soon, hopefully on time. for the Consensus conference timeframe.
As ioBuilders we will keep on supporting the EEA vision, and trying to be active, sharing our needs, pains, and vision. We will work with all the vendors to choose the best for us, depending on the project, needs, and maturity of the solution. We and all the EEA community, have the responsibility to make interoperability happen. Hopefully on next meetings, more people participate. I wish to have more enterprises, customers on board. It’s hard to understand that having had this edition on Lisbon, more european players weren’t on stage. On the other hand, we are part of the overall Ethereum community, where enterprise approach is always a source of discussion, and we need always to have 2 mindsets, to bring a common sense vision.
Lets head up to https://ethcc.io/ and keep on being part and commiting to this amazing community. Let’s #buidl!
Hopefully https://io.cash is on everyone’s lips soon.
