Richard Brown of R3 recently wrote of his admiration for the public chain vision of Ethereum, but also noted that its current scaling and privacy challenges are too great and that “[o]nly the Corda network can deliver this.”

While we disagree with his conclusion, there is a deeper message in Richard’s comments that we think bodes well for the future of Ethereum. Enterprise blockchain providers like R3 and IBM, long purveyors of “blockchain good, bitcoin bad” pronouncements, are now accepting the inevitability of public chain use cases in industry. The walled gardens of consortium blockchains, though useful as proofs of value, pale next to what a scalable, interoperable blockchain network could do for enterprise. Brown himself clearly acknowledges this:

“The possibilities that open up when these disparate applications, initially deployed by different groups for different purposes, can interoperate in the future are mind-boggling. There’s no genius on our part here, of course: THAT is the obvious implication of the Ethereum vision applied to business.”

On the other hand, Brown does not provide any description of how the global Corda network will work — only vague promises that they have experimented with a few users and will be rolling it out soon. Indicating “wrong” and “right” in a comparison graphic does not count as technical detail. The Ethereum community, conversely, has been transparent and exhaustive with its technical concepts and plans.

Over the past year, some twenty working groups have collaborated on white papers, research, and education on sharding, zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and layer 2 solutions like Raiden and plasma. The documentation for all of this work takes into account extensive comments from leading researchers and is made readily available to the larger Ethereum ecosystem.

Moreover, Brown himself comments that a perfect network is not useful if no one has joined. The public Ethereum network has million of members, and, contrary to Brown’s writing, many enterprises are securely transacting for its base use case of transferring and storing value already.

Nonetheless, we would still take this opportunity to rebut a few of his points: