Some fresh news from New York City and Berlin: The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Mainnet Working Group has formed a key Task Force named EMINENT (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises), focused on the standards and specifications used to integrate the Ethereum Mainnet with ERP, CRM, and other corporate systems of record.

The EMINENT Task Force is being organized with significant contribution and commitment from EEA member organizations Chainlink, Unibright, Anyblock Analytics, and others. The team is now open to accept other EEA members to join (note that as the Ethereum Foundation is an EEA member, anyone with a proper EF email can participate). If you’re not an EEA member but want to get involved in this activity, please contact [email protected] for information on joining the EEA.

Rearranging existing architectures around centralised ERP-systems towards decentralization implicates new ideas about how systems interact, what kind of (internal) states can or should be recorded in a publicly available distributed ledger, how external information is included, and how the growing amount of data can be handled and analyzed. Challenges herein involve concepts on computation, storage and messaging which bridge the gap between entirely centralized system landscapes and pure smart contract implementations.

Chainlink as the leading oracle provider for inputs and outputs of smart contracts; Unibright as the leading player in blockchain-based business integration; and Anyblock Analytics as an innovative provider of blockchain data analytics and tools; formed this dream-team to accelerate and scale the adoption of Ethereum in businesses.

The task force’s focus is to build open source available reference implementations and guidelines for mainnet integration with enterprise “systems of record”. Every software that serves as the backbone for a particular business process can be seen as a “system of record”: an information storage and retrieval system serving as an authoritative source of truth, like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, and systems supporting processes in Financials, Controlling, Material Management, Sales and Distribution or Human Resources.

The task force is set up to work for 18-24 months. Initially, the task schedule will focus on defining work packages, then expand into building best practice solutions within proof-of-concept implementations, and finally provide open-source available documentation and specification basis (like ERC standards) for further development by the public Ethereum community and EEA members. Intermediate results will be presented to the public while the task force is active.

There is potential for creating synergies and intended points of contact with other EEA working groups, such as the Enterprise Use Case and Requirements Task Force (for both understanding mainnet integration as a potential use case and finding use-cases for reference implementations), the Cross-Chain Interoperability Task Force (when considering cross-chain integration with enterprise systems of record) and the Technical Specification Working Group (when it comes to extracting standards of the concepts developed).

Tas Dienes, MWG chair: “We are excited to see all of these companies working together to realize the benefits of using Ethereum mainnet in enterprise applications. The system of record integration use case is a strong one, and this task force’s work will dovetail nicely with others such as the Enterprise Use Cases and Requirements Task Force.”

John Wolpert, MWG vice-chair and convener: “Getting the Mainnet working as an always-on enterprise service bus ( #magicbus ) is a powerful idea that security-minded CISOs can get behind. Imagine a world where you don’t need to expend massive capital to support every new partner integration. To make this work, we need experts laying down the standards for common-sense integration with enterprise systems of record. Unibright has the experience connecting blockchain to ERP. Chainlink has the experience keeping different databases, run by different companies, in a state of consistency. That’s a promising combination.”

Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink: “We’re excited to work closely with the EMINENT Task Force to continually push the boundaries of what’s possible in public blockchain environments. Developing mainnet integration standards that take into account the specific challenges of enterprises is key to the EMINENT Task Force being able to leverage the unique advantages of public blockchains, while seamlessly and securely incorporating their current systems of record and key data sources.”

Stefan Schmidt, Unibright Co-Founder and CTO: “In current client projects we all see a lot of individual development due to the lack of standards. Our goal is to make life easier for enterprises and technology providers, to help building standards and to be able to focus on the special 20% of an individual use-case, rather than re-inventing wheels all the time. The setup of this task force is very powerful and we are happy to be a leading part of it.”

Freddy Zwanzger, Anyblock Analytics Co-Founder and CDO: “We are very happy to work with our already existing partners Unibright and Chainlink on solutions specifically for enterprise use cases. While our tech stack also works with permissioned blockchains, we see great potential for interoperability and innovation if corporates are building on the public Ethereum Mainnet as well.”

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About the EEA Mainnet Working Group

The EEA Mainnet Working Group, a joint initiative of the Ethereum Foundation and the EEA, extends the focus of permissioned blockchains (serving as a distributed ledger within business consortia) to the public Ethereum mainnet. The group will make the case for how the mainnet can be used in a safe and effective way by businesses.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. Chainlink is consistently selected as one of the top blockchain technologies by leading independent research firms such as Gartner. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to great companies like Google, Oracle, SWIFT, and many other large enterprises, as well as many of the world’s best smart contract projects/teams such as Web3/Polkadot, Synthetix, Loopring, Kaleido, OpenLaw, Reserve, and many more.

Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website, Twitter or Reddit. If you’re a developer, visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord.

About Unibright

Unibright is a team of blockchain specialists, architects, developers and consultants with 20+ years of experience in business processes and integration. Unibright turn ideas into businesses, and improve processes with the help of blockchain technology. Unibright worked for Lufthansa, Deutsche Bahn Vertrieb and others and is partnered with Microsoft and SAP.

Unibright develops enterprise solutions , invests in start-ups, builds process modelling tools and integration platforms and offers a 360° ecosystem around tokenized assets.

Learn more by visiting the Unibright website, Twitter and Medium.

About Anyblock Analytics

Anyblock Analytics GmbH is a German blockchain solution provider. Our mission is to build bridges between different organizations, across various blockchain networks and most importantly between people. We offer methods, tools and data to integrate business processes with blockchain.

Anyblock Analytics operates the blockchain analytics platform Anyblock Index that contains all data from all publicly available Ethereum-based networks. It is a searchable blockchain index and data source with real-time API and full SQL access down to the smart contract event level. For example, this can be used to monitor blockchain applications or to create graphical dashboards.

Learn more by visiting the Anyblock website, and follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.