By Andreas Freund, EEA Mainnet Curiosity Group Member
There are new, thrilling, never-before-possible enterprise use instances for L2 options assembly enterprise safety, privateness, and compliance necessities whereas nonetheless leveraging Ethereum Mainnet’s safety assurances, and connecting to the colourful Ethereum ecosystem starting from monetary providers to produce chain to rewards packages. Whereas it’s early within the innovation cycle, the alternatives are actual, large, and have short-term realizable ROI.
Enterprise Layer 2 and Scalability Options Use Circumstances
The standard Blockchain/DLT use instances of enterprises fall into certainly one of two classes: monetary providers and provide chain. Many enterprise initiatives have applied options in these two areas. Nonetheless, these have been virtually completely on personal blockchains and never Ethereum Mainnet.
The 2 major considerations of enterprises in adopting the Ethereum Mainnet have been each transaction scalability and privateness. Each of those can now be addressed with Layer 2 options equivalent to zk-zk Rollups or zk-Optimistic Rollups or extra interoperable Sidechains as was mentioned intimately within the earlier weblog publish.
This implies the next, high-volume, full privacy-preserving enterprise use instances grow to be now viable:
- Digital Asset Exchanges
- Funds or Digital Asset Transfers
- Digital Asset Funds
- Digital Rewards Packages
- International Provide Chain Traceability
We are going to focus on these in additional element under. There are, after all, extra enterprise use instances equivalent to high-volume, ultra-short-term Insurance coverage Merchandise Platforms, Digital Gaming Platforms enabling Play-to-Earn fashions and stopping on-line gaming fraud, or privacy-preserving federated machine studying (ML) platforms to create unbiased ML fashions.
Digital Asset Exchanges
Unsurprisingly, digital asset exchanges for fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their advanced composites aren’t solely the primary use case for public scalability options on Ethereum
Mainnet but additionally enterprises with a give attention to:
- Excessive-Frequency Buying and selling, the present bread-and-butter of conventional exchanges.
- Secondary asset markets that historically have been very illiquid or arduous to handle, equivalent to by-product markets of debt devices equivalent to Credit score Default Swaps or Repurchasing agreements
- Over-The-Counter buying and selling of illiquid property equivalent to various funding automobiles, together with Fund of Funds, Oil and Fuel futures, andReal Property Funding Trusts
- Actual-time audit reporting for the end-to-end commerce lifecycle from pre-trade to post-trade compliance, for instance, whereas preserving privateness however not compromising the correctness of the audit
Funds or Digital Asset Transfers
Much like Digital Asset Exchanges, funds have been a spotlight for each public and enterprise initiatives from the start. The large benefit of L2 and different scalability options in comparison with conventional fee rails equivalent to VISA, SWIFT or ACH isn’t primarily in conventional funds however somewhat in:
- Micropayments for digital providers equivalent to streaming or information connectivity providers and Particular person-to-Particular person transactions in rising economies utilizing SMS funds on cell units
- Machine-to-Machine funds of autonomous brokers equivalent to autonomous automobiles which have been delegated funds by their proprietor and may management them to make or obtain funds on behalf of the delegatee to pay congestion charges, usage-based insurance coverage, or being issued digital property equivalent to carbon credit for the avoidance of CO2 emissions.
In these purposes, L2 can present the extra advantages of privateness preservation whereas enabling full regulatory compliance with KYC or AML guidelines.
Digital Asset Funds
Conventional asset funds equivalent to Mutual Funds or Cash Market Funds have important regulatory compliance necessities starting from consumer funding suitability necessities, to fund allocation limits and asset class restrictions to stop-loss necessities primarily based on the respective official funding prospectus. Giant funds have, subsequently, important operational prices to provably adjust to all regulatory necessities whereas preserving buyer privateness. Layer 2 options, particularly zk-zk Rollups with their recursive zk proofs, may help alleviate these points by:
- Enabling full Fund audits by anybody, anytime, in real-time primarily based on the onchain recursive zk-proofs,
- Making it unimaginable for the Fund to cheat since all zk-proofs must be validated earlier than being finalized onchain,
- Enabling traders to maneuver forwards and backwards between conventional and crypto property, or crypto representations of conventional property by representing conventional property with their zk-proofs onchain and vice versa.
These may be achieved whereas sustaining full confidentiality by the very nature of the zk-proofs.
Digital Rewards Packages
Digital shopper rewards within the type of loyalty factors or rewards collectibles are steadily rising in recognition, though they’re at present cumbersome to manage for enterprises, and in addition increasingly more require interoperability between loyalty packages as enterprises companion with one another and let customers switch rewards between packages. The necessities for these packages are sometimes a mixture of Digital Asset Exchanges, Digital Asset Transfers, and Digital Asset funds we simply mentioned. Due to this fact, and given the big transaction quantity globally inside and throughout rewards packages along with the stringent privateness necessities arising globally such because the EU’s GDPR, L2, or different scalability options are eminently suited to scale and allow real-time interoperability by exchanges of Digital Rewards packages.
Synchronizing Programs of Information between Enterprises at Scale
B2B transactions have historically been fraught with points round information synchronicity between two programs of file as a result of there isn’t any assure that contract phrases are correctly represented in an ERP system — addresses, product numbers, or fee phrases come to thoughts — or that the historical past of economic transactions (Orders, Invoices, Credit score Memos, and so forth.) are precisely mirrored in each ERP programs — incorrect tax calculations or incorrect software of quantity reductions to pricing are classics. These points result in tons of of billions of {dollars} in alternative prices yearly throughout the practically three trillion B2B transactions a 12 months globally. Bigger organizations with 1000’s or tens of 1000’s of enterprise relationships globally not solely have the headache of the chance prices but additionally the problem of sustaining one-to-one integrations between many programs of file, usually with arcane know-how.
By way of design patterns and protocols equivalent to Baseline, L2, and different scalability options that assist each advanced EVM-type good contract logic aligned with the enterprise guidelines round business paperwork equivalent to Orders and Invoices and privateness preservation by zk-proofs are:
- Enabling the synchronization of programs of file by imposing information consistency by zk-proofs that may solely be generated accurately if the submitted business paperwork adjust to the related enterprise guidelines and information encoded into its zk prover programs’ program circuits,
- Enabling full B2B transaction audits by anybody, anytime, in real-time primarily based on onchain recursive zk-proofs,
- Making it just about unimaginable for counterparties to cheat since all zk-proofs must be validated earlier than being finalized on-chain, whereas
- Sustaining full confidentiality by the very nature of the zk-proofs
International Provide Chain Traceability
Lastly, international provide chains have at all times been a spotlight of blockchain initiatives, and a few packages have gone into manufacturing equivalent to Meals Belief, Marco Polo, Commerce Lens, or the Morpheus Community. But these have primarily been on personal networks, regardless of some notable exceptions equivalent to Morpheus. Nonetheless, with the problem of the G7 to digitize international provide chains inside 18 months, the ever-increasing stream of small package deal imports from overseas by on-line retail platforms, and the necessity for customs group to have visibility into provide chains even earlier than a product is ordered, generally known as “Intent to Import”, are creating important transformation pressures. On the one hand, there’s a must create transparency, whereas alternatively not revealing business-sensitive data, not just for particular person transactions however for all provide chains and their intersections. For instance, a shipper importing items right into a harbor in containers involving not solely customs but additionally a number of importers for every merchandise within the containers.
Once more, L2 or different scalability options that assist each advanced EVM-type good contract logic and privateness preservation by zk-proofs are:
- Enabling full provide chain audits by anybody, anytime, in real-time primarily based on onchain recursive zk-proofs,
- Making it very tough for the provision chain members to cheat since all zk-proofs must be validated earlier than being finalized onchain and their predicates — a.okay.a. statements of information — are public, whereas
Sustaining full confidentiality by the very nature of the zk-proofs.
What does this imply for Enterprises?
Now, for the primary time, enterprises have the chance to mix the very best of each worlds — purposes that meet enterprise safety, privateness, and compliance necessities whereas additionally having fun with the improved financial safety assurances and digital asset community results of Ethereum Mainnet. Despite the fact that the know-how remains to be quickly evolving, and the underlying cryptography remains to be “younger” by enterprise requirements, enterprises are suggested to get “into the motion” now. Why? To benefit from new DeFi alternatives to drive net-new income equivalent to constructing enterprise acceptable and regulatory compliant merchandise from these new asset courses, or mixing and matching new and current asset courses into new monetary merchandise at scale, or leveraging the scalability of the brand new L2 options with the improvements of decentralized exchanges’ automated market makers to create concentrated liquidity swimming pools alongside worth or premium curves. And, lastly, to collaborate with rising L2 distributors to construct the subsequent iteration of L2 options to “enterprise spec.”
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