The Baseline Protocol. Ethereum for Enterprises, with the help of Unibright! Unibright.io Follow Mar 4 · 4 min read

New York, NY, March 4, 2020 — Today, EY, ConsenSys, and Microsoft announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol, an open source initiative that combines advances in cryptography, messaging, and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet.

Unibright will play a major role in developing the Baseline Protocol, which is about connecting traditional systems to each other via Ethereum Mainnet. The Unibright Framework will be “baseline ready” to support visual smart contract modelling, generation, connection and monitoring of baselined processes.

The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project, which is managed by OASIS and funded by the Ethereum Foundation and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

The Baseline Protocol has already brought together more than a dozen companies and organizations that will form its technical steering committee (TSC), including EY and Microsoft. Unibright is among those founding members, as mentioned in the official press release: https://consensys.net/press-releases/

What is Baseline?

The Baseline Protocol creates the opportunity for compelling enterprise blockchain solutions, enabling secure and private business processes via public Ethereum Mainnet.

The Baseline Protocol addresses the main demands for enterprises with using blockchain technology: privacy, permission, performance.

The Baseline Protocol enables confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving sensitive data on-chain.

The Baseline Protocol uses the Ethereum Mainnet as a common frame of reference: always on, unrestricted, pay-per-use.

The Baseline Protocol supports tokenization and DeFi, and leaves enterprise data safely in traditional systems.

The Baseline Protocol is open source under the Oasis foundation.

This means a breaking change in understanding a public blockchain, as John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet states:

“A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”

Technically, the Baseline Protocol can be set up by a “microservice architecture”. All participants in a business process set up one of these microservice containers, including:

The Baseline API, a gateway to all services in the container, and to the mainnet

A queuing system, providing queue management and orchestration of all services in the container

A secure message service, providing secure stateless message transport

Zero-Knowlede-Proof Service: A service providing means to generate proofs of private logic execution and consistency

All containers are connecting to “registrar smart contracts” on the Ethereum Mainnet, acting as a common frame of reference.

Baseline and Unibright

Unibright will contribute to the open source project behind Baseline, by adding and reviewing code and specifications. This will be coordinated alongside with the work of EMINENT, the Integration TaskForce under the roof of the EEA, where Unibright already plays a leading role.

On our product side, we will adapt the Unibright Framework to be fully “Baseline compliant”, and offering our toolset to establish a complete business lifecycle on the Baseline Protocol:

The Unibright Workflow Designer: Visual definition of baseline ready business processes (e.g. Request for Proposal, Request for Quotation, approval processes and many more)

The Unibright Lifecycle Manager: Generating code for and connection to the needed registrar smart contracts (without the need of writing a single line of code)

The Unibright Connector: Providing pre-built and configured adapters for off-chain systems of record (like SAP and other ERPs and CRMs) to connect to the Baseline API

The Unibright Explorer: Monitoring the ongoing processes across private and public chains and including off-chain systems

Marten Jung, Unibright CEO:

“The Baseline Protocol is the missing link that we all waited for, to help enterprises making use of blockchain technology. Our concept of “scaled blockchain networks”, that we already outlined about a year ago when we proposed a novel solution to the German Ministry of Health, would be easily implementable on the Baseline protocol. As tokenization and decentralized financial services will be explicitly supported by the Baseline Protocol, our tokenization efforts (around liquidity, custody and other services) bundled in Unibright Freequity will also receive a huge leverage from our efforts in developing the Baseline Protocol.”

Stefan Schmidt, Unibright CTO:

“Our engagement for the Baseline Protocol is totally in line with our approach to both contribute to open-source available standards and build commercial software products around it. Our partnerships with SAP and Microsoft will support our efforts in both business process implementation in SAP Hana, and cloud-based-hosting and integration on Azure.”

We will present more material and updates on the progress of the Baseline Protocol and the Unibright development. For a first explanation, check out the video of Unibright’s CTO here: