Written by James Orme Tue 14 May 2019

New specifications aim to resolve the biggest challenges of deploying blockchain business applications

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the open standards organisation aiming to accelerate business adoption of Ethereum blockchains, has released new specifications aimed at helping businesses create more efficient, simple and interoperable blockchain networks.

The specifications include a set of APIs for enabling off chain blockchain transactions; where transactions are executed off the main network before summarised and returned to the main chain.

Although blockchain networks are considered more secure and transparent than traditional networks, they have been criticised for their comparatively limited performance, raising doubts over their viability for enterprise use cases, including supply chain and financial services.

EEA said off chain compute can improve the business viability of blockchain in three ways:

Layered privacy: Off chain compute can facilitate private blockchain transactions “between mutually untrusting parties” where transaction details are not shared with all members in a blockchain network, EEA said.

Selective privacy: In addition, EEA said the new specification aims to support segmented disclosure of information, i.e. revealing only certain information to a given party, while keeping other information private.

Performance and storage: By shifting intensive processing off the main chain, network throughput and scalability is improved, EEA claimed.

In addition to releasing its first off chain specification, EEA released version three of its client specification, which defines ways to speed up transactions via permissions automation and a faster consensus algorithm; the Clique Proof of Authority (POA) algorithm.

PoA algorithms improve transactional throughput compared to Proof of Work algorithms (PoW) as they do not require each computer on the ledger to complete a complex mathematical equation before validating transactions, instead pre-validating certain users with the authority to do so based on their identities.

The specification also describes ways to build a diverse range of permission systems for enterprises that use smart contracts to decide both who can join a ledger, as well as read/write privileges.