“The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it will not survive.” –Peter Drucker

This is the first article in a ten-part series on Enterprise Ethereum. Part 2, “Enterprise Ethereum Use Cases and Applications,” will discuss the major sectors that are currently deploying Ethereum blockchain solutions to address industry problems.

What Enterprises Need

Enterprises have very different needs from individual users on a peer-to-peer network. Enterprises need to manage sensitive data in high volume, track quality, and hold themselves accountable to safety and regulatory standards in their industries, be it issuing IDs, executing trades, tracking cargo containers, or labeling pharmaceutical products. Security, certainty, and accountability at scale are paramount for a high-performance enterprise. Enterprise needs ultimately fall into four categories:

Permissioning. Enterprise use cases often require that only authorized parties can join the network, and that participants have different read, access, and write roles.

Enterprise use cases often require that only authorized parties can join the network, and that participants have different read, access, and write roles. Privacy. Specific transaction data — product name, quantity, price, address, personally identifiable financial information, etc. — should be withheld from or made available to network participants depending on their roles. A freight forwarder, for example, might not need to know the contents of a certain shipping container, but only that the container has arrived. Banking regulations also restrict who may have access to transaction data.

Specific transaction data — product name, quantity, price, address, personally identifiable financial information, etc. — should be withheld from or made available to network participants depending on their roles. A freight forwarder, for example, might not need to know the contents of a certain shipping container, but only that the container has arrived. Banking regulations also restrict who may have access to transaction data. Performance. Enterprises must have the infrastructure to process thousands of transactions per second and tolerate periodic surges in network activity. One sales order with a thousand lines, for example, triggers a cascade of transactional events. In today’s networked economies, enterprises must be able to collect, validate, and publish an ever-increasing volume of diverse transactions.

Enterprises must have the infrastructure to process thousands of transactions per second and tolerate periodic surges in network activity. One sales order with a thousand lines, for example, triggers a cascade of transactional events. In today’s networked economies, enterprises must be able to collect, validate, and publish an ever-increasing volume of diverse transactions. Finality. Institutions transferring large amounts of money need certainty about the outcome of transactions. Funds must be good, and payments must be final.

What Ethereum Offers: Facts and Benefits

Ethereum launched in 2015 as a much more extensible and performant version of the Bitcoin payment system’s underlying blockchain technology. The value of a blockchain is the native certainty of the network: participants can establish a trusted and immutable record of transactions without the need for intermediaries. The decentralized architecture of a blockchain — multiple distributed nodes simultaneously running the software and building the record — ensures that the certainty of the network is never compromised.

The power of the Ethereum blockchain is its programmability: agreements are embedded in the code so that transactions automatically execute. These digital agreements, or “smart contracts,” can have limitless formats, conditions, and even call on other contracts, making Ethereum useful not just for payment settlement, but for arbitrating transactional events in trade finance, supply chains, government registries, energy grids, real estate, law, and many other sectors.

Stability and Popularity of the Ethereum Blockchain

Ethereum has proven to be highly robust against attack while also supporting a diverse range of applications. It is popular for both public and private networks. Here are the facts of the public mainnet today: