How We Plan to Help Accelerate Industry Adoption | Karen Scarbrough - Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

[Music] okay great are we ready excellent um well thank you everybody who came out for this thank you for everybody watching online thank you to the entire eth Denver team and all the volunteers here this weekend it's really wonderful to be here uh my name is Karen Scaro I am the executive director of the Enterprise ethereum Alliance and today I am here to talk to you about our next moves and how we would like to help accelerate industry adoption here and it's actually far from my first eth Denver I came out here in 2018 as a hacker um far less people um and less projects to talk about it's really amazing to see what the city of Denver has done with this event what the event team has done what all the projects have done that have come out of this event and that's definitely a model and a scale that the Enterprise ethereum Alliance would like to model in terms of impact um in the upcoming years of the aggregation of community and impact that you can have in the ethereum ecosystem so with that let me take you through a little bit of what the Enterprise ethereum Alliance is and our history and where we've been the last couple of years so we started back in 2017 with a couple of core companies that helped us in our our founding establishment um we had names like Microsoft consensus um enture and many others uh BP a former employee of mine um Microsoft my also current employer uh and with that we actually had hundreds of members at the time all joining around the ambition to integrate blockchain technology into Enterprise and see where the technology could take the use cases that we had within Enterprise to the next level and uh much like many areas of technology in the economy in general we have uh seen the interest uh wne and and wax with different cycles that we've gone through so um certainly in 2018 post Ico boom and then um seeing the ramp up and Defi and stable coins we again saw industry take tremendous interest in the use cases and the new things coming out of the ethereum ecosystem and at that time the Enterprise ethereum Alliance in addition to the standards group groups that we have in the webinars that uh we put on in the event presence that we did have we really started talking a lot more about startup web 3 ecosystem as opposed to uh private blockchains and the differences therein uh I recall at the time uh vitalic had a wonderful article that came out around the legitimacy of the public ethereum ecosystem that I used prolifically with an Enterprise because it had really reached an exciting level of adoption um and uh technical achievements that you could point to as real stepping stones in an iteration Journey towards scale and plans for the ecosystem in ethereum next so uh another important step on our journey at the Enterprise ethereum Alliance has also been the business Readiness report and the initial business Readiness report came out in 2002 or 2022 excuse me uh and at this time we had around 100 180 use cases across different Enterprises this 100 Page Plus report Encompass interviews uh different charts and and graphs of relevant data within the ecosystem and uh happy to report that we published the 2023 Enterprise ethereum Alliance business Readiness Report with an additional 260 use cases this year uh and another 100 Pages plus of in-depth data and Analysis and interviews of what's been going on in the ethereum ecosystem and it's exciting time because uh again we're starting to see from the um the hype cycle that happened last time the Le legitimacy of the improvements around scalability privacy and other aspects of the ethereum ecosystem that are again starting to track up interest within the Enterprise community so when you think about what's top of mind for Enterprise and the lens through which they may view this ecosystem um a couple of different Frameworks can come to mind and one is overall General Innovation for uh an Enterprise ecosystem and so when you talk about blockchain or ethereum or uh zero knowledge proofs or anything within that context sometimes it can get put in a category against other bigname Technologies so you got uh interest here in Quantum from the Enterprise envir environments uh AI has certainly taken a lot of precedents this year things like robotics but all of these technologies that Enterprise can tend to look at through a lens of uh let's do a proof of concept how is this going to differentiate our business model in the future and that's where with blockchain um similar to all these other different ecosystems having the narrative around the Readiness of this technology and the actual data to support it being at the proper Readiness level is really important so you can see for example I'll I'll point out the statistic around AI being that 20% 25% of SE Suite executives are using this uh in their day-to-day working activities is a pretty strong indicator of the alignment um and uh investment that will go into an Enterprise actually adopting this and uh pushing it Forward certainly so you know what are we going to uh share as a BL blockchain ethereum ecosystem to build the the right conversation around why Enterprise would be interested in this and that really brings us to putting it in the proper lens of any Enterprise it environment because at the end of the day all those uh different categories of innovation are very exciting um but they're often not the core business of what a Enterprise company does so uh keeping the lights on ensuring scale for your customers proper user experience and all those related bits are also very important uh and this is where uh you get positioned against um other Technologies in terms of security scalability cost uh privacy regulation all those different bits uh so with that and considering the the lenses through which the ethereum ecosystem can be more successful in Enterprise what we'd like to move forward with at the EA is a mission to be the credible voice of reason that commercial entities can rely on for a clear understanding of the ethereum ecosystem and to do that we want to create an environment to do business in ethereum by bringing together Enterprise leaders startups Builders and innovators and uh this will be the journey that we start to take over the next year and one that we've really been in for several years now but amplifying the contact with the uh ethereum community and the the edge of innovation yet the requirements of Enterprise is something that is top of mind for us and we really want to see transform uh in the future over the next year so to give you an example of how we want to to help clarify narratives and uh discuss the ethereum ecosystem in context with industry one of those uh data points that you can look at is the ethereum daily transaction rate and you can see in the defi um up ramp of 2020 2021 we start hitting uh significantly higher transactions uh per day and then we Plateau so it if you have not taken the information in context it can look like well where did ethereum scaling go uh we said in 2020 that we wanted to scale defi we wanted to uh make it so that more users can use ethereum and uh the discussion around l2s although very prominent here may not be in other Realms of uh people who are interested in this technology on a uh basis for using it within an Enterprise that uh may not be living and breathing this day in and day out how we may all be here and that's where we would like to more so showcase that against the daily transaction rate how you need to consider that in context is the layer 2 ecosystems which the ethereum ecosystem hypothesized would help us scale in 2020 2021 have actually achieved what they set out to do and that now those layer 2 ecosystems are scaling ethereum by a factor of eight and a half um last time I checked a couple of days ago so it's an excellent presentation of how the builders in ethereum had an idea about how they needed to solve an engineering problem and they actually executed it um and it is uh displaying positive results so far the other things that we'd like to bring to light uh as far as the advantages of the ecosystem and where to consider it in terms of sustainability and uh comparison uh and The Wider blockchain ecosystem uh also include things like client diversity so this is something that to my knowledge at least um although as the space grows it it seems to only grow more limited because there's so much out there uh the ethereum ecosystem is really unique in the approach to uh client diversity and for for those online or out in the audience who may not be familiar this is that the ethereum nodes that run the network exist in several different languages and the purpose for that is that if the CL cent in uh C goes down then the client written in another language can uh pick up the ecosystem and carry it forward so we don't have downtime so it's important that uh among all these uh different clients that run different uh types uh of of uh languages with their nodes that we have a balance between them and that the ethereum ecosystem is supported so you can see uh on one side with our consensus clients we're doing very well um on the ex execution clients here I know there's some red marks but it was only just yesterday that uh coinbase uh has uh also announced that they are going to start running a diversity of their uh staking clients as well which is excellent um and then you know the layer beyond that is that this Basu client um on the chart here too is one in which you can run a private ethereum Network and you can also point that to a public network of you're choosing so how wonderful of an on-ramp for an Enterprise to you know potentially work with a client that can do both for them in the future so that's another uh you know amazing way to introduce uh Enterprise to some content that is unique to the ethereum ecosystem and actually has a real amount of strength behind it as well when you consider all the options that you could do and and then uh another key data point that is top of mind for Enterprise particularly with all of the news headlines of of 2022 that we all saw and you know just cringed a little bit but uh the uh addressing of um not only the um the ofac sanctions but you know things of the nature of scams and regulations and all that needs to be considered for an Enterprise ecosystem to address um we hear the negative side and headlines a lot but if you look under the hood uh the block builders for the ethereum ecosystem right now uh actually most of them run a type of protocol that uh does not uh allow non ofac um compliant transactions effectively and you know there's a whole layered discussion here that I want to be very clear on there's no um you know favor or favoritism for censorship here when it comes to Enterprise but the fact that you can prove that you can be compliant is actually a real benefit to the ecosystem because that needs to be demonstrated not only to Regulators but businesses who want to come into the environment as well and not put their Core Company at risk uh and trying this new technology so uh that's another interesting data point and then of interest to Enterprise as well is uh where am I going to find the resources the talent the builders to to be here with me and uh build and sustain a product that I do build uh and for that number as well we've seen positive Trends over the last year in which the software development kit installs have increased 31% year on-ear and if you also look into other key areas of technology which are uh including zero knowledge these days the ecosystem for that if you looked at it 4 five years ago the accessibility to an average developer was Far different um in that you had to be uh much more of a PhD level cryptographer to access building a zero knowledge proof to fit in your smart contract to execute uh on an evm chain um now there's you know four or five six probably more uh different languages that a um that a a strong developer who doesn't know ZK could come in and and make a smart contract that can work in those ecosystems so it's uh a great demonstration on how not only are more developers uh getting active in this space but we are also better building better tools for which developers can get active in this space so when it comes to really articulating our next moves besides just uh demonstrating some of that data to a wider ecosystem within the uh industry and uh to uh other Enterprises that uh are considering multiple different options more succinctly we want to provide that industry data um through items like our business Readiness report but also transition that into Data that's consistent throughout the year we usually launch the business Readiness report once a year with that large 100-page report we want to provide data more consistently for our Enterprises um and those in Enterprise may be familiar with game names like Gartner who have a a High um degree of credibility within Enterprise ecosystems for the data surrounding Innovation um we would like to be the the gardener of blockchain innovation for Enterprise companies and then uh what we're doing here as well uh The Presence at events uh so making sure we come alongside those in the ethereum community um and also build a presence for our members uh in events specifically for Enterprise so this year we do anticipate to have a lot more in-person events be present in more places and then also uh facilitate more webinars both informational and informal um so that we can uh continue to provide both passive and active ways for our members to participate in the Enterprise ethereum Alliance and in addition to that we want to continue to provide viewpoints so we do have standards groups uh and interest groups that have worked uh over the course of the lifetime of the Enterprise ethereum Alliance uh we actually several years ago even had an interest group around Ai and blockchain which um actually stopped participation due to lack of interest and I think we've got the interest back now it's uh certainly one that we would like to revive but not only that we've got uh the defi risk management accounting um paper that has just come out as well from one of our standards groups uh we've got our eth trust that articulates ways to build a decentralized application uh in a secure way from start to finish we've got our ethereum training quality groups picking out the strongest courses for Enterprise individuals to go out and utilize so we really uh value the members that lead those so thank you to them while I'm up here as well and we want to uh see a lot more this year and lastly um Community I articulated that we wanted do this through events but also making sure that um you an an Enterprise as someone who is interested in blockchain and ethereum for their business that you have a community of like-minded people to pull ideas from to learn from um and help accelerate the uh adoption within industry in general so some recent highlights like I said were the ethereum business Readiness report uh and while I'm up here uh big thank you to the ethereum foundation for that they they helped us put that to uh or helped us uh have the resources to do that um and it's been a tremendous benefit for the Enterprise community and the working group activity that I referenced um the eth trust uh group that we have just released their security level spec and I believe version three is actually coming pretty soon as well uh that one was released in December and our our defi group uh defi risk management or accounting management yeah that acronym always trips me up a little but drama for Enterprise ethereum Alliance means Defi and we have also released the defi risk guidelines paper for comment um so I can share the the link online and and share this presentation but those comments are open till April 15th and we'd love to get more Enterprise input on how those were articulated so with that uh I just want to say thank you to to everybody for coming out uh if you are interested in EA membership I've given you the path here and definitely uh check out our business Readiness report as well so thanks [Applause] everyone [Applause] before you go you still