The blockchain industry has been striving for widespread adoption across various sectors for years.
While it has gained traction in sectors such as finance and healthcare, it still has a ways to go, and for business adoption, privacy seems to be the missing ingredient, according to the EU’s global blockchain leader Paul Brody.
Ahead of the Token2049 conference in Singapore, Cointelegraph reporter Andrew Fenton spoke with Brody, who highlighted how privacy will be the catalyst for blockchain use cases.
Paul Brody of EY at Singapore Token 2049. Source: Cointelegraph
Blockchain for business
Brody said a lack of privacy is a major hurdle for blockchain adoption for businesses, especially large-sized companies.
“The number one issue for enterprise users and for more serious institutional investors, is privacy. Blockchains don't natively have privacy. Now you have some degree of pseudonymity or level of privacy if you are transacting through an exchange and you're buying a fungible asset.”
However, he said for enterprises and large institutional investors, that’s not really possible for a variety of reasons.
Whether it’s details of business contracts or competitive pricing strategies, Brody argued that organizations need a way to keep certain data private while leveraging the benefits of decentralized technology.
“Businesses don’t want to disclose all the details of the contracts. That's often sensitive, - if they gave somebody a really good price, they don't want to be disclosing that. [Companies] are very happy to tell you how many tons of carbon they save — they just don't want you to be able to see that on a week-to-week or a day-to-day basis.”
Privacy on public chains
Brody said that “privacy on a public chain is very hard to achieve " but that the industry is troubleshooting the problem.
The team at EY, for example, has been pioneering privacy-focused solutions through their work on Nightfall, a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology built on Ethereum layer 2 and Polygon.
Nightfall enables secure transactions without exposing sensitive data. Brody said:
“We're building the infrastructure so that you can create applications and make transfer payments. We're also building applications for enterprise users especially…”
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Brody mentioned one such application: EY’s Off-Chain Contract Manager for Renewable Energy Purchasing. “We can take the key rules of a renewable energy grant, like a renewable power purchase plan, and turn them into a fully private on-chain smart contract,” he explained.
Supply chain and blockchain
Another area that could greatly benefit from blockchain, and has been a classic use case for the technology in theory is supply chain management.
Projects like VeChain aimed to revolutionize trust in product authenticity and traceability. However, these solutions haven’t taken off at the expected pace. Brody also attributes this to the lack of privacy protocols.
“I think supply chain tracking is an amazing use case. It's absolutely pointless without privacy tech.”
He said EY is currently undertaking its first pilot for end-to-end supply chain traceability under privacy on public Ethereum with full tokenization.
“I’ve been chasing this for a decade,” he said. “I feel like we’re so tantalizingly close to grasping that item and making it production-worthy.”
“Supply chain use cases are amazing, if we can get enough privacy to make it work.”
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