Yesterday EY announced it is plowing $100 million into blockchain and crypto-asset research, as well as engineering and services. We’ve asked over what period the investment will happen.
While most other consultants support a mix of blockchains, from the start EY committed to Ethereum under the blockchain leadership of Paul Brody. Since then, it has launched both public and private blockchain solutions, including participating in the creation of the Baseline Protocol alongside ConsenSys and Microsoft, which aims to help enterprises adopt the public blockchain.
One of EY’s offerings is the EY Blockchain Analyzer suite of tools. Currently, this has three services, an Ethereum smart contract testing tool, a blockchain explorer and a tax calculator.
Bugs in smart contracts present big security risks for private and public blockchains, but especially the latter, where they can be exploited without the ability to reverse transactions. Hence, there is a demand for extensive testing of all public blockchain smart contracts, especially for decentralized finance (DeFi).
EY announced a new Testing Studio, which is part of its Smart Contract & Token Review tool, enabling users to customize smart contract tests and simulate transactions on the public Ethereum mainnet. It boasts support for complex DeFi contract ecosystems.
Tokenizatoin platform SolidBlock used it. “It was very beneficial to simulate how our contracts could perform on the network prior to deployment and test the contracts against widely known attacks in this market,” said Co-CEO Yael Tamar.
EY also announced that it is open-sourcing Starlight, a way of creating zApps or decentralized applications that use Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). The aim is to enable enterprises to add privacy to smart contracts where they don’t want competitors to see business logic. This is not the first time EY has open-sourced ZKP technology, with the previous Nightfall release.
We note that the software has a Creative Commons license as opposed to the Apache 2 license, which is more popular with businesses. Key differences are Apache 2 includes the grant of a patent license and the right to sub-license.
Finally, EY also announced its latest client of the EY OpsChain Traceability solution, Italy’s Birra Pironi.