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Page last updated: March 4, 2024

Ethereum for enterprise

Ethereum can help many kinds of businesses, including large companies:

  • Increase trust and reduce the cost of coordination between business parties
  • Improve business network accountability and operational efficiency
  • Build new business models and value creation opportunities
  • Competitively future-proof their organization

Enterprise blockchain applications can be built on the public permissionless Ethereum Mainnet, or on private blockchains that are based on Ethereum technology. Find more information on private Enterprise Ethereum chains.

Public vs private Ethereum

There is only one public Ethereum Mainnet. Applications that are built on the Mainnet are able to interoperate, similarly to how applications built on the Internet can connect to each other, leveraging the full potential of decentralized blockchain.

Many businesses and consortia have deployed private, permissioned blockchains based on Ethereum technology, for specific applications.

Key differences

Why build on Ethereum Mainnet

A key benefit of public blockchains to businesses is monopoly resistance. Using Ethereum Mainnet as a neutral referee to coordinate business transactions avoids putting your trust in another company, over which your competitors may gain control or influence, putting you at a disadvantage. On an open, permissionless, and decentralized platform that anyone can join, use, and contribute to, there is no central authority who may use their power to gain an advantage over you.

Enterprises have been experimenting with blockchain technology since around 2016, when the Hyperledger, Quorum, and Corda projects were launched. Initially the focus was largely on private permissioned enterprise blockchains, but starting in 2019 there was a shift in thinking about public vs private blockchains for business applications. EY’s Paul Brody has talked(opens in a new tab) about the benefits of building on public (vs. private) blockchains, which (depending on the application) may include stronger security/immutability, transparency, lower total cost of ownership, and the ability to interoperate with all of the other applications that are also on the Mainnet (network effects). Sharing a common frame of reference among businesses avoids the unnecessary creation of numerous isolated silos which cannot communicate and share or synchronize information with each other.

Another development which is shifting the focus toward public blockchains is Layer 2. Layer 2 is primarily a scalability technology category which makes high throughput applications possible on public chains. But Layer 2 solutions can also address some of the other challenges that have driven enterprise developers to choose private chains in the past(opens in a new tab).

Resources

Further reading

Non-technical resources for understanding how businesses can benefit from Ethereum

Organizations

Some collaborative efforts to make Ethereum enterprise friendly have been made by different organizations

  • Enterprise Ethereum Alliance(opens in a new tab) - The EEA helps organizations to adopt and use Ethereum technology in their daily business operations. Its goal is accelerating business Ethereum through professional and commercial support, advocacy and research, standards development and ecosystem trust services.
  • Global Blockchain Business Council(opens in a new tab) - The GBBC is an industry association for the blockchain technology ecosystem. Through engaging policymakers and regulators, curating events and in-depth discussions, and driving research, GBBC is dedicated to further adoption of blockchain to create more secure, equitable, and functional societies.

Enterprise developer resources

Products and services

Tooling and libraries

  • Baseline Project(opens in a new tab) - The Baseline Protocol is a set of tools and libraries that helps enterprises coordinate complex, multi-party business processes and workflows with privacy while keeping data in respective systems of record. The standard enables two or more state machines to achieve and maintain data consistency and workflow continuity by using a network as a common frame of reference.
  • Chainlens(opens in a new tab) - SaaS and on-prem blockchain data and analytics platform from Web3 Labs
  • Ernst & Young's 'Nightfall'(opens in a new tab) - an application for transferring ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 applications under Zero Knowledge, using an Optimistic Rollup
  • Truffle Suite(opens in a new tab) - blockchain development suite (Truffle, Ganache, Drizzle)

Scalability solutions

Layer 2 is a set of technologies or systems that run on top of Ethereum (Layer 1), inherit security properties from Layer 1, and provide greater transaction processing capacity (throughput), lower transaction fees (operating cost), and faster transaction confirmations than Layer 1. Layer 2 scaling solutions are secured by Layer 1, but they enable blockchain applications to handle many more users or actions or data than Layer 1 could accommodate. Many of them leverage recent advances in cryptography and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs to maximize performance and security.

Building your application on top of a Layer 2 scalability solution can help address many of the concerns that have previously driven companies to build on private blockchains(opens in a new tab), yet retain the benefits of building on Mainnet.

Enterprise applications live on Mainnet

Here are some of the enterprise applications that have been built on top of the public Ethereum Mainnet

Payments

Finance

Asset tokenization

Notarization of data

Supply chain

Insurance

Credentials and certifications

Utilities

If you would like to add to this list, please see instructions for contributing.

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