The leader of global blockchain innovation from one of the world’s leading business advisory firms asserts that despite a challenging beginning in 2021, we are now standing on the verge of a significant industrial revolution driven by the Ethereum blockchain within the global business landscape.
Paul Brody from EY discusses with Kitco correspondent Matt Nesto why he believes ETH serves as the ideal B2B platform for numerous tasks that extend beyond the scope of the financial regulators.
Read on for an extract of the video and watch it in full here:
Matt: What are the most exciting blockchain use cases you’re seeing right now, both on the government side, and the business enterprise side?
Paul: There’s a lot of focus right now on the state of the regulatory environment and what we can or cannot do. I would say certainly Finance is important but the core thesis I’ve been operating on at EY is the idea that fundamentally blockchain is actually the perfect platform for pretty much all business-to-business use cases…it’s a perfect mechanism for managing, automating, and scaling up business to business transactions.
Matt: Let’s talk about some exciting new developments. What’s hot right now?
Paul: The big ingredient that was missing from public blockchains that we’ve now really figured out is privacy. For enterprises, tokens are a really great way to manage inventory. You can manage a token, keep track of it and move it around, but if you don’t have privacy your competition is going to see how much you have and where you’re moving it. So, the big breakthrough that we’ve been waiting for, and I feel like we really have finally achieved, is the ability to have secure private transactions on public blockchains.
Matt: Is real adoption related to real world asset tokenization?
Paul: When a lot of people talk about real world assets (rwas), they mean things like real estate bonds. Those are more financial assets. I’m thinking about industrial assets like machinery, capital equipment, and inventory. The beauty of the art of tokenization is what it does for business assets. Tokenization allows you to take almost any kind of business asset and package it in such a way that it can be digitally transacted, managed, purchased, sold, and moved in a way that’s extremely efficient and very disciplined.
Matt: I think Ethereum is becoming the dominant blockchain and displacing some competitors in doing so. Is that correct?
Paul: Yes. Technology industries love standards and they love scaling around the standard, and what I observe here is that we’re experiencing the same thing with Ethereum as a network infrastructure as we did with TCP. Like it or not, perfect or imperfect, the future of the programmable smart contract ecosystem is the Ethereum blockchain and all of its associated layer 2 Networks.
Matt: Where do you fall on Bitcoin and how relevant is it in your day-to-day work?
Paul: Bitcoin is carved out of space as the digital gold and for finance people, Bitcoin is the most important digital asset. When it comes to building business applications, programmable solutions, DeFi… Ethereum is the platform. Bitcoin has actually made some progress in terms of supporting tokenization and programmability but at the end of the day I think it’s very distant, not even second to the programmability of the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem. Based on history, we are too far down the road for Bitcoin to suddenly reassert dominance as not only a digital asset but also a programming ecosystem.
Watch the video now and hear Paul’s views surrounding the Ethereum blockchain in this informative interview with Matt!
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