Ethereum Business Readiness in 2022 | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] I hope you are all having a fantastic day like my name is Anna and Evelyn and I'm very excited because this is the first day of talks in the tropical Sunset and today we have the talk of ethereum business redness in 2022 with Dan sha and Dan Burnett thank you so much thank you all the dance ethereum Enterprise you have to be called Dan uh so hi I'm Dan Shaw from the ethereum foundation um you know I I work with the uh Enterprise uh big businesses back in 2017 uh at the launch of uh the ethereum the Enterprise ethereum Alliance the eea uh you know vitalik called for collaboration amongst private and uh you know public um uh you know to to be able to support Enterprise needs and um you know I I joined back in um in 2020 to come in and support those Enterprise users uh you know when I came in uh there were some you know sort of big blockers for uh you know going on on mainnet um you know concerns around privacy gas prices and you know regular regulatory risks of holding assets um over the past year and a half I've been really happy to see a massive sea change away from uh only uh a private chain and you know gradual introduction of uh real real mainnet adoption but I really didn't know you know what was going on uh and I'm really happy to share what uh Dan Burnett and the EA have been working on uh you know to really you know give us some proof give us some data uh and uh I've been really surprised at uh at the majority of of what's going on you know things are farther ahead and farther on mainnet than you might think so Dan Burnett thanks so much [Applause] hello oh there we go all right okay thanks um and I may ask you to put the notes font size back to what we had agreed to um all right thanks uh yeah all right so anyway what I'm here to talk to you about today is a report that the EA wrote issued earlier this year our ethereum business Readiness report so you know in the media all the stories are focused on uh you know popular media right all focused on crypto speculation nft speculation uh big collapses and things like that but as the ethereum ecosystem matures more and more businesses are actually adopting the technology unfortunately that story is not as visible to the general public okay and um it's as as an organization that is committed to enabling uh other organizations to adopt and use business uh ethereum uh in their day-to-day business operations uh we thought it was important to shed light on what's actually happening in business use of ethereum today so behind the defy nft and so on headlines now there are some challenges to this in particular day-to-day projects are all happening behind the scenes okay many of us know about them or those who are sort of crypto Savvy but those outside of this room outside of the the crypto bubble were definitely not aware of them so our our goal was to find them and quantify them and that's that's what we set out to do so we did a a mix of direct interviews case study development surveys and also the other uh important part with this particular report was to be able to educate business decision makers about how to think about ethereum-based deployments so the work that we did is based on both quantitative and qualitative research we did the quantitative research where I'll talk about that a little bit more later but the point is that we focus primarily on the qualitative our goal was to was to do storytelling based on case studies and interviews and when I say storytelling I mean stories that make sense to businesses one of the reasons we focus so much on case studies is you know everyone in this ecosystem likes to ask well what are the use cases what are the use cases what are the use cases use cases are for sellers case studies are for buyers buyers don't want to hear what you could do buyers want to hear what works today so that was one of the the important goals that drove what we did um so just very quickly I'm gonna I'm gonna walk through this part this is something that's in the report we from a business perspective we describe kind of the the history of the ethereum platform as having three main phases in the early days of of course there's a lot of excitement experimentation with you know decentralize all the things and there's a lot of great experimentation that's still happening of course um but there was a realization pretty early on that there were some limitations from a business perspective in using the public mainnet and in particular the three that we always talked about the three p's were privacy permissioning and performance those were things that the the broader public Community was not interested in focusing on at the time but but for businesses are just absolutely essential okay and that actually led to a focus on private blockchains private Consortium networks um using ethereum or or other other Technologies now as we all know there has been a great Revival of interest in public blockchain and this is actually from a business perspective also that's driven by of course what we've seen with consumer defy which is uh demonstrated that decentralized business models can work um also nfts but also some technological improvements and I'll I'll talk about that a little bit more later on so um before I um before I talk about what's on this slide I want to mention that from this point on everything that I describe is being viewed through a business lens okay so when I when I show Circles of certain sizes and so on this is based on our particular data set what we did is we we collected a data set that was restricted to down to about 118 business oriented ethereum projects these are projects these are companies or projects that are active now have live teams and are developing solutions for traditional business problems so the data set is somewhat small and eclectic and keep that in mind when I when I draw some conclusions like I do on this particular slide um yes please reduce the font size back down one or two thank you on the notes um okay stop there thanks um so uh okay so on the left side here what we have is the business projects organized by industry and the Lion's Share of course has been an infrastructure and fintech unsurprisingly we're basically still in in the stage of building the platform and selling picks and shovels okay I mean that is really where the industry is particularly from a business perspective now if you look at use cases on the right side most of the activity is in software development and fintech which of course aligns with what I just said and so again it's still early stages there's a lot of Need for building core materials yet foreign so I just wanted to throw this up some people like looking at logos this is a subset of the companies and projects that are in our database I'm not going to talk about it this isn't exhaustive but just to give you an idea of of uh some of the the companies and projects that showed up in that list of 118 now one of the things we wanted to do was uh well look if we're gonna if we're going to put out a report on business Readiness of ethereum we have to Define what business Readiness means okay so that was our first goal was to figure that out and through the interviews that we did we came up with a way to define it that we believe is is useful for business so our goal keep in mind with this report is to always to do two things and education is one of those parts so we wanted to make sure to educate people and we also wanted to give businesses a tool as they evaluate uh ethereum technology and deployment possibilities so we developed what we call our ethereum business Readiness framework um and we think this is the first attempt that we're aware of to do this in an in a neutral way okay so we're not selling anything in particular other than ethereum of course right um so what we ended up with is seven technical criteria which you'll see in the the coming slides and three non-technical criteria with some detailed definitions again who's whose goal is to educate a business audience and through this we believe that businesses can learn a lot about what is important and what to think about as they um as they're considering deployments okay so down the left side here and I know this is an eye chart I don't expect you to read it I'm just going to describe some of what's on here so down the left side are our seven plus three criteria they are quickly Network cost network decentralization security scaling privacy sustainability usability interoperability and then regulation and compliance ecosystem resources and ecosystem robustness and from our perspective and all the interviews we did those captured the factors that businesses cared about it was particularly important to us to make sure that we included decentralization because a lot of businesses today just still don't even understand why that is something they should care about okay so anyway if you look at all these criteria on the left not all businesses are going to Care equally about those criteria so the goal of this particular chart this particular uh item this section of the report was to answer the question which of these criteria are actually important to me so what we looked at was four different types of businesses as we call them large corporates small and medium Enterprises startups and then there's government which is not a business but they're they're a category worth considering in uh in this discussion so um there are two things I want to highlight so on the sustainability side and again I know you can't see all of these but I just want to talk about a couple of them so almost all businesses care about the environment but governments and highly visible corporates care a lot because they can face very high and costly reputational risk okay if they screw up sustainability nowadays on the security side all companies of course want the best security but corporates and governments uh interestingly they have a lot of resources to ensure security whether it's Financial Resources legal technical whatever and so in some cases and I know this is sacrilege to say it okay but in some cases they're willing to centralize to sacrifice some decentralization in return for scaling but that's not true for smaller businesses in particular one of the main appeals of blockchain technology is precisely the security against technical failure attack manipulation and so on that Network decentralization offers so they may be less willing to compromise in that particular respect now we did this because we wanted to show this before we got to describing different architectures and where we think they fall okay um so what we did then was we we basically evaluated those criteria against four different deployment architectures you'll see we called it Network archetype in the report what we're talking about is basic deployment architectures the four categories are five columns but there are four primary ones is the public mainnet mainnet plus and L2 mainnet plus a side chain and private Network the second column is mainnet post upgrades because we put this report out of course before the merge and there's a lot of other great stuff coming and we wanted to make sure that people didn't look at the lighter uh the lighter boxes here which don't look so good for the public mainnet and say oh yeah that's always going to be the case no it's definitely not and as we do this report each year we're going to continue updating it in terms of where where we're actually at so a few examples here from a network cost perspective the cost to to actually operate a private Network can be very low even when you're running your own infrastructure the the actual operations cost can be quite low um and we know the main net is expensive today okay um and that's being worked on we know um in terms of ease of use by businesses uh layer twos or side chains uh actually have the most support interestingly because the ones who are building those layer twos or side chains provide a lot of information and a lot of help on how to make use of them uh if you do a private chain on the other hand it's all on you right so it's not easy at all if you want to do a private chain you have to do a lot of the work yourself from a compliance perspective a private Network it's the easiest to implement you know controls such as kyc um and on you know the mainnet is of course fully decentralized on the other on the other end so most of this shouldn't surprise you too much but again this is written for chances are it's written for your customers the people you're trying to sell to and who need someone to explain this to them in a way that they can understand um that did not do okay all right so one of the things we did was we wanted to give examples of how you might use this framework for a specific use case and again I know it's an eye chart you can't see all these it's all in the report but um we basically analyze these criteria against um the deployment architectures that that I talked about so for each of these architectures we scored the criteria is very poor poor neutral good and very good where good is out here and poor is in the center on these radar graphs um so I'm just going to hit a couple of headlights so the upper left one is asset tokenization and then payments Payment Solutions is just to the right of that so for asset tokenization mainnet score is very high on usability and interoperability for tokenization um but you know if you have a project for which high performance and Regulatory Compliance are priorities you'll want to be working with an L2 or Si chain or or you could consider building a private Network on the payment side for payments use case ethereum is a payments Network essentially out of the box I mean you know Finding information about how to do uh how to do payments with ethereum or something built on top of ethereum is not at all hard but again if you have high volume you're going to want to work with a layer 2 or side chain uh particularly if you have uh if you're if you're addressing retail customers now interestingly if you actually have a wholesale business you might not need to go to that and you could actually do a private Network more simply today more simply more cheaply if you have a a wholesale business okay um I said that we did interviews um we actually have way more than six interviews but I just wanted to give a few examples of some of the people that we spoke with uh we spoke with people who actually were building these projects we also spoke with some well-known people in the space and probably some of the people here in the room and I just haven't seen them yet um but I just want to give you an idea of this within the report we actually include quotes uh throughout because we found that the quotes from these people are the thing that are are the they express this better than any of us could because they're dealing with it uh every every single day so I've got um I've got three examples here um and the one that I'm gonna uh I'm gonna actually call out is is in the middle uh from Benson of acre Africa acre Africa provides parametric insurance for small holding farmers in Africa so what they said is we could have done this on our own with a database but we wanted public proof that those triggers that the customers signed up for when buying are still the same ones used when it comes time to pay out that is a great example of the transparency that you get from a good blockchain solution so anyway this is there's just a few we have a lot more um but these interviews really helped us with the insights which is what I'm going to get to shortly um so we took that 118 projects and whittled it down to 12 for a super deep dive okay so we were looking at doing case studies on on 12 of them um nine of the projects were ready for us to include them in the report and three said we want to be there but not yet talk to us next year okay so we ended up with nine that are in the report I don't have time to go through them I wish I did too short a presentation today but please do read it in the report because there's a lot of great insights for each one of these we did a detailed case study and also put the key takeaways for a business audience again okay um so after all of that we tried to distill everything that we had heard into some some insight so if you're going to take pictures of anything it's probably this slide and the next one so there is a growing appreciation now um publicly right of of an ability to use the public blockchain that is new that's a that's a really good thing to hear and decentralized business models are beginning to make some sense because defy right so people realize there's something there they don't know how to do use it yet they don't know how to how to make it work yet but but they know there's something there that's important um technological advances ZK proofs Etc are addressing the privacy concerns and a variety of the the upgrades coming or have already happened in in the mainnet are going to be addressing the remaining business issues over time but now of course we know that you need to use multiple uh multiple layers or multiple networks in order to address some of the performance and and permissioning I want to talk about private and public blockchain for a moment there are still as I mentioned some good use cases for uh for private blockchains but we're beginning to see the use cases merge much more strongly than we've seen before we're also beginning to see some hybrid options where people are using private for some things and public for others and that's that's that's an interesting uh an interesting result as well one of the things we heard very clearly was that l2s and side chains are no one expects those to be a temporary solution so even with everything that's planned in terms of upgrades for ethereum um no one who is actually building projects today believes that LTS and side chains are going to be temporary they're expecting them to be here to stay to you know to remain okay um when we first when we did the the research here the number one blocker that was listed was sustainability across the board this of course now that's not the big blocker that it was because of the merge so the second one is now the top one and that one was regulation and that's not probably not going to surprise this audience um but it's interesting because it's actually not a blocker for all use cases and um if you can you can see some of the use cases where it's not in the report or catch me later and I'm happy to talk with you but there are some for which it's not an issue yet and um hey nfts are really making people aware of what digital assets are and can do so that's that's pretty neat um and then the final comments I want to make are that look we believe this is going to sound obvious right we believe that the ethereum ecosystem is ready for business of course we're going to say that no actually here's the caveat the caveat is it is not yet out of the box ready that's the key result that we got um okay don't scroll that far please um all right um so anyway the good news is there are a lot of different options right there are a number of different architectures and they're not bad I know that this community is trying to push the the edges at the EA we're trying to move the middle okay and so it's helpful for us to be able to explain that there are alternatives today and um and those Alternatives will get you moving and you don't want to wait there are good reasons to explore decentralized models okay um of the you know and and to take advantage of the processes of the type ethereum makes possible um one of the quotes that we heard was since what previously relied on faith between two or more parties can now be proven mathematically on a blockchain any situation which someone has to say I have to trust you is an opportunity for a blockchain based solution today we increasingly see this being put into practice going forward the opportunities are as numerous as the Myriad business challenges that depend on this kind of trust okay so here's my eea slide um on the left is free materials on the right is what members get I'm not going to walk through all of it but I want to talk about on the left side we have primers that we're putting out there basically if you remember like the college you know plastic two-sided sheet cheat sheets were for algebra or whatever else that's what we're putting out and they're targeted at non-technical business people c-suites in general we want to make sure they understand the trade-offs of the things that we're talking about they are free to download and use they're under our resources tab we also have a large number of educational webinars blogs we hold events and so on one of the things that we just launched this week it's brand new so hit it hard and expect some problems but we do want you to try it on our website lower right corner there's a chat a chat icon um look at some of the options that come up but the reason we did that is that's intended to be a help desk it has a help desk for business people one of the things we heard most often from businesses was look I can call anybody that I do business with but how do I call ethereum that is literally what they said how do I call ethereum so our goal was to create a front end that makes it easy to answer some of those initial business questions that people have our goal is not to steer them to a particular provider but to help get that initial understanding out of the way so when they come to talk to you they have some idea what they're talking about all right and the last thing I want to put up here is uh there's lots more in the report you can download it for free that QR code will take you to that URL which takes you to our website where you can you can download the report so with that I'm going to see if Dan has anything he'd like to finish with great thanks Dan um so you know uh for 2022 we got through uh 100 projects and you know got down to you know just just to uh just a few of them um you know kind of the call to action is uh you know if you have a project that you're working on um grab a Dan any Dan will do uh probably one of these dance uh or anybody at the uh the Enterprise ethereum Alliance the EA and uh yeah we'd love to uh you know hear about your project and uh you know potentially included in uh next year's report Yep this was the first one keep sending them in so we can we can do more thanks thank you okay thank you so much for this amazing overview of the eea it's been impacting the Enterprise adoption thank you so much and so uh should we leave now yeah but thank you but there's some few minutes okay maybe if there's questions uh yeah well we have a lot of questions so we can start there hi we are going to give you the microphones yeah yeah for the people that I so um can you share some specific examples of specific businesses who are implementing ethereum today on a public or private uh chain because you give like more of a general overview but I know curious of specific companies that are doing that right I understand and they've just taken away my my list with my notes where I left all the companies so I could answer that question with a whole bunch but it's okay um so um one of the uh one of the companies that um that we know of is Alia they did a a public uh placement I'm sorry private placement using um using blockchain and that was that was very successful um Microsoft uses nfts to track components in their Azure server Farms so they basically do supply chain uh tracking using an nft for every single component not because and and by the way they're doing this essentially privately okay they're doing it on a private network but the reason they're using nfts is because they found them very convenient as a as a holder for information that they needed to carry along the the process um I mentioned acre Africa that's another one of my favorites um oh gosh let's see so one of my favorites is uh the again it's a Microsoft Microsoft UI uh you know they've been uh really really great partners and and doing a lot of good work um they have taken all of um the Xbox royalties that they would um you know potentially give to EA Games and all all the network that that are a part of uh you know the Xbox network and they've tokenized that and what used to be uh you know Financial reconciliation that you know took months uh you know now as as a uh you know spark contract driven uh instantaneous project process that uh um you know it goes through the entire supply chain large and small uh you know Partners down the line uh you know automatically get get there uh get their fair share and uh just a fantastic example and use case for for uh for blockchain and there's a lot more I really do mean you know download the report you'll you'll get a lot more from that thank you okay sorry thanks but you can ask for sure more things here thank you thank you so much [Applause]