“Proof of concept” is a phrase heard often when it comes to Enterprise Ethereum. It’s a stage. It means that a company is working to understand how blockchain can help them and in what way, and how it should be implemented from a technical perspective. Before 2018, many companies entered this stage and stopped there. Perhaps enterprise blockchain was in the “early adopters” phase, in a lifecycle similar to Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption life cycle from “Crossing the Chasm.”

Were we straining to cross the chasm of enterprise adoption?

For Enterprise Ethereum, and for other new technologies and platforms, the path to mainstream adoption will perhaps follow the three steps: 1) ideation 2) conceptualization and 3) actual implementation. Up until this year, organizations worked to conceive practical use cases, or to actually find the time, resources and buy-in to commit. After all, blockchain is designed to coordinate multi-company processes, so getting buy-in across multiple parties takes time.

As we near the end of 2018, the story has changed, the ice has broken. Enterprise Ethereum usage has moved from proof of concept to the next phase. Functioning projects are being built, delivered and put into use. Let’s take a look back at this year in three sections, starting with the enterprise market, including the tools and products that launched this year, and then to the good stuff: the real-world use cases and success stories. We’ll close with a brief look at the latest in Enterprise Ethereum community and consortia standards.

1. Enterprise Blockchain/Ethereum Market:

Contrary to the turmoil occurring in the cryptomarkets, in many ways, 2018 was an important year for the steady development and growth of enterprise blockchain. Many top enterprises, including the 10 largest companies in the world, began exploring blockchain use cases in their industry. Market Watch estimates the global market size of enterprise blockchain at $entre4.6 billion in 2018 and will expand to $20.3 billion by 2025. The level of interest in enterprise blockchain is also growing. Coursera and ConsenSys launched a Blockchain Foundations course that quickly gained thousands of sign-ups, with a majority of the interest coming from the enterprise sector. Use cases from providing Syrian refugees with easy digital payments and verifiable identities to promoting financial inclusion across the rural islands of the Philippines are delivering real-world social impact using Enterprise Ethereum.

Enterprise-grade Product Launches

Product-wise, we might look back on 2018 as the year that momentum around Enterprise Ethereum products reached a level reflective of public Ethereum. Up until this year, JP Morgan’s Quorum has been the primary Ethereum client modified for enterprise needs, allowing permissioning controls regarding access to networks and more robust privacy settings. Quorum implementations fall under a public licensing which necessitates that any software created with it be made open source.

This year, more Ethereum clients have launched (including Mana, a client written in Elixir a coding language based on the Erlang’s Virtual Machine) to improve on Quorum and broaden the market. The most significant advancement is Pantheon from PegaSys, the Protocol and Engineering Group at ConsenSys, which we wrote about back in October.

Pantheon by PegaSys — Now Hyperledger Besu

Pantheon was written with the singular focus of getting enterprise Ethereum implementations to production. The Java client seeks to be an extension of Quorum and represents a major milestone in enterprise Ethereum for multiple reasons.

First, Pantheon has been released under a more enterprise-friendly license, Apache 2.0, which allows enterprises greater ownership over the software they develop. Secondly, Pantheon is a java client, a programming language that brings with it an estimated 10 million developers and a host of technical advantages for enterprise implementations of Ethereum, from it’s pluggable architecture and plethora of libraries to valuable monitoring and infrastructure tools.

But perhaps most interesting with far-reaching effects is that Pantheon allows users to run nodes within a private, enterprise network as well as nodes that can connect to the Ethereum mainnet. This ability to bridge to the mainnet has huge potential; in the words of the PegaSys team, it allows private networks to “seek compatibility with the powerful network effects Mainnet applications will be able to offer.” This also opens contribution to the protocol layer from a plethora of knowledgeable developers.

Kaleido

With over 1500+ consortia blockchain networks, 4000+ nodes and 150M blocks generated since launching in May, no other product in the Enterprise Ethereum ecosystem has seen the success of Kaleido or made real progress towards making enterprise blockchain easier to adopt.

Kaleido’s Blockchain Business Cloud, in collaboration with ConsenSys and AWS, is the leading SaaS platform for building, running and scaling complete enterprise blockchain solutions. It accelerates and simplifies the entire journey from blockchain exploration, proof of concepts and pilots to live production business networks. It’s the first and only platform that offers production-ready, consortium-level plans that cater to a spectrum of needs and roles among network participants. The platform enables users to create a private chain in a matter of minutes and a straightforward interface for onboarding and governing users, along with plug-and-play access to related services, cloud integrations, and 3rd party applications through the Kaleido Blockchain Marketplace.

Kaleido makes it both easy and free for users to get going with its Starter Plan. Just as Salesforce simplified and democratized access for CRMs, Kaleido is transforming enterprise blockchain with its easy-to-use SaaS and low cost of entry.

“The development of Kaleido could well become one of the more important blockchain stories of 2018 and beyond. It is quite possible that the enterprise use of Kaleido will one day be considered the equivalent of a seal of approval for a network’s blockchain technology.” – Born2Invest writer, J. Frank Sigerson

We discuss notable enterprise success stories of 2018 below and most are running on Kaleido.

Amazon and EY Launches Blockchain Enterprise Solutions

Also of note is Amazon’s announcement of their AWS Managed Blockchain, which will offer support for Ethereum some time in 2019 and will have a console allowing users to deploy nodes, add and manage users, and support high-transacting, scalable applications.

And lastly, Ernst & Young made a groundbreaking announcement that it has developed an implementation of private transactions on the public Ethereum network using zero-knowledge proof technology, called EY Ops Chain Public Edition, potentially removing the need for totally private enterprise Ethereum networks. This could enable companies to interact and transact on the mainnet while keeping transaction data, terms, and participants private. Enterprises will also have the advantage of the security from the thousands of decentralized nodes that the mainnet provides compared to smaller private networks.

2. Enterprise Ethereum Use Cases:

Sector: Trade Financing

Problem: Commodities financing requires a tremendous amount of trust between transacting parties to hedge against all of the vulnerabilities the industry’s complexity allows. Imagine a container being transported from Hamburg, Germany to Long Beach, California, two of the largest ports in the world. That one container requires many verification points along the supply chain, meanwhile banks, financers, imports, exporters, and governments all experience financial risk resulting from any potential delays, errors, or miscommunication.

Solution: komgo is a global blockchain-based trade financing platform that can digitize letters of credit, which are traditionally paper documents that describe the financing options firms have on commodity trades.

Future Implications: The komgo platform will eventually provide digital verification of cargo shipments for specific letters of credit, which can provide transparency, reduce costs, and prevent fraud.

Sector: Banking and Finance

Santander

Problem: Banks struggle with compliance, payment settlements are often slow, and the threat of cybersecurity attacks is always prevalent.

Solution: Santander Bank developed a cash tokenization utility and real-time payment system for domestic and international payments on Ethereum. Payments were cleared, settled, and disbursed in 10–15 seconds.

Future Implications: Transactions of money and digital assets via a blockchain are approaching fast and will reduce friction for customers, prevent fraud, and provide greater transparency for financial systems.

Problem: Over 35 million Filipinos still do not have bank accounts because they are located in rural or hard to reach places.

Solution: In 2018, Project i2i — the network that aims to provide financial inclusion to unbanked Filipinos — has grown from 6 participating banks to 110 banks in the year 2018. The partnership between ConsenSys and UnionBank plans to have 480 rural banks and 2,600 branches in the region on board by early 2019.

Future Implications: The pilot, which leveraged Kaleido, proved that blockchain can be harnessed in order to reach farther into rural communities and include people who are otherwise financially excluded.