CoindeskBig Four professional services firm EY is rolling out free software designed to help corporate clients use the ethereum blockchain – and it’s taken an unusual step to encourage adoption.
Announced Tuesday, EY’s protocol, internally code-named Nightfall, has been developed over the last year by the consulting firm’s team of over 200 blockchain developers and will be published in May. The protocol was created for such use cases as supply chains, food tracing, transactions between branches of a company and public finance.
Like other enterprise blockchain platforms, Nightfall takes advantage of a technology called zero-knowledge proofs to allow private transactions on a shared ledger. But unlike most such endeavors, EY’s software is intended to run on top of the public ethereum network, not a private variant.
Further setting the project apart is the unusual approach EY is taking to intellectual property. The firm said it will not merely open-source the code – that is, release it with a permissive copyright license – but put it in the public domain, with no license at all.
“We want to maximize adoption and community involvement, we want people to adopt it, and adapt it, and improve it. If we retain ownership, people may not invest that much time and energy in something they might not control,” EY’s global innovation leader for blockchain, Paul Brody, explained at a press briefing. “The cleanest way to make everybody use it is just to give it away with no strings attached.”
Nevertheless, Brody suggested this was a difficult decision, telling reporters:
“A year of coding work. This is a million dollars worth of stuff we’re giving away.”
Audit processes will certainly be revolutionized by greater use of blockchain. It will completely change the idea of how a company is audited, its expenses and its earnings. And it is quite likely that public, open source, and mainly decentralized blockchains will offer much greater advantages than closed blockchain attempts.
