During Consensus by Coindesk 2023, the ConsenSys Mesh Enterprise ZK team was invited to present their recent applied R&D at the Hyperledger booth. The team explained how the zkEVM and Hyperledger Firefly can be combined for enterprises to enable decentralized business automation as a service.
See the 30 min presentation here.
A Summary:
Despite digital transformation driving significant revenue for enterprises, the cost of trust, in the form of cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, is increasing exponentially. The Enterprise ZK team is piloting decentralized business automation solutions. These solutions introduce the concept of a zkEVM rollup for enterprise & DAO’s as enterprise collaboration frameworks that make digital business automation trustless.
Decentralized business automation (deBA) across enterprises is a complex task due to the inherent independent control and privacy requirements of each participating enterprise. deBA, using zkEVM and DAO’s, can be conducted to ensure digital processes occur in Zero Trust and under Zero Knowledge which accomplish the following:
- Authenticate and authorize every other participant for every single digital business interaction at all times
- Prove and verify the authenticity, integrity, and accuracy of every digital service transaction and its data supply chain
- Minimize the exchange of sensitive data in a digital service transaction, ideally to zero.
The satisfaction of this criteria allows enterprises to meet regulatory requirements, mitigate business risk, and collaborate in ways previously untenable. Collaboration in this context is referred to as Multi-party Zero Trust under Zero Knowledge (MZTZK).
The zkEVM is a capable execution environment for decentralized business automation because it allows private and verifiably correct execution of smart contracts. In the enterprise context, it empowers multi-party collaboration as a trusted synchronization point for business automation because it:
- Simplifies zk-proving of business processes between counterparties
- Inherits strong security guarantees by settling proofs to Ethereum as an L1
- Facilitates trusted private state exchanges with zk-bridging (leveraging Firefly).
Using zkEVM as a launchpad, DAOs can be incorporated to launch private, trusted, and decentralized business automation. Together, zkEVM and DAOs can create an enterprise collaboration framework that utilizes DAO architecture to automate and govern multi-party business decisions while ensuring private and verifiably correct execution handled by the zkEVM.
To simplify enterprise adoption of this technology, decentralized business automation solutions need to be offered as a service that are hosted, out-of-the-box, and configurable. Enterprise ZK is advancing zkEVM as a Service and DAO as a Service. These offerings equip enterprises with user-friendly platform and application layers, enabling them to configure and execute shared business workflows seamlessly.
zkEVMaaS (zkEVM as a service) is a PaaS offering that enterprises can use as the secure and trusted runtime environment for multi-party business workflows encoded into smart contracts. DAOaaS is a SaaS offering that enables low-code configuration, deployment, and management of DAOs for enterprises. With these offerings, enterprises can enjoy the benefits of:
- Configurable & simplified DAO contract creation
- One-click DAO deployment
- Point-and-click DAO governance: Participant management, service proposal voting, governance rule management, and DAO treasury management
- Running decentralized enterprise services
Within this new framework, enterprises can build federated ERP systems that combine multiple, independently owned and operated systems into a unified coordinated system to deliver enterprise services. This clears the hurdle of blockchain consortium networks that allow multiple entities to share and access resources, but lack the control and privacy enterprises truly want. With enterprise-controlled zkEVM nodes, a new trustless zk internet can be created. Complex business processes can be executed and proven under Zero Knowledge. Bridges between enterprise-controlled zkEVM nodes allow trustless data sharing across company walls, where only the necessary data outputs and corresponding zk-proofs are shared with peers. Therefore, by connecting disparate systems and creating the trustless data exchange plumbing between them, end-to-end digital business services can be delivered to end customers without sacrificing control, privacy, or scalability.
As written about previously, the Enterprise ZK is working on telecom solutions with MEF that utilize decentralized business automation. The two pilot projects in development by the Enterprise ZK team within this sector are Service Level Agreement (SLA) Assurance and on-demand connectivity quoting and ordering. More industries such as healthcare, energy, shipping, banking, and waste management are anticipating deBA solutions. Stay tuned for more upcoming blog posts about these industries.
Learn more about the Enterprise ZK team’s work here.
