Ernst & Young wants to be ‘the best on Earth at Ethereum’ says the firm’s Blockchain head

At this year’s Messari Mainnet Summit, Paul Brody, the blockchain lead at Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) told Decrypt that his company is “all in on public blockchains.”

He talked about EY’s involvement in crypto, reiterating that the firm was indeed one of the earliest adopters in the traditional financial world.

In 2015, EY formed a blockchain division to continue work on public blockchains. Initially, it also worked with private blockchains, but that has “really slowed down over the years,” Brody said Decrypt.

He elaborated: “Unlike everyone else, we actually build tools and applications in this space, so for example we built our own blockchain audit platform, where we can do on-chain and off-chain transaction reconciliation.”

EY’s internal arsenal currently includes one smart contract testing tool developed by their security team in Israel, a system called EY Ops Chain which uses tokenization for traceability and transparency within supply chains, and a Zero Knowledge (ZK) Optimistic Layer 2 Abstraction for Reasonable Enterprise Transactional Privacy.

This latter tool was donated to the public sector and converted into Polygon night.

7 years of EY’s blockchain services

Brody put EY’s early adoption of crypto down to the fact that senior management was convinced of the power of blockchain technology. “This will be the future path of most business-to-business transactions, and we don’t just need to know a little bit about it,” Brody said. “We have to be all in.”

According to Brody, approximately 65% ​​of EY’s blockchain work revolves around audits.

The remaining disk is much wider and includes NFT tools, food traceability and improving environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. Brody also said the company is building a carbon offset marketplace and carbon tracking tool.

“The pattern we see over and over again is that companies want to dip their toe in first with something relatively simple. If you’re a bank, that might mean selling Bitcoin and to customers,” he said. “Over time, they move up to more material activities: issuing assets, selling products and services, building DeFi tool. I like to think of it as a slippery slope.”

The bear market and Ethereum

Finally, Brody spoke at length about how the current bear market is affecting EY’s blockchain division, adding that financial services clients actually care about the violent price swings. Still, he said, they see the volatility as “a feature, not a bug.”

However, the industry customers are much different. Instead, “they see Ethereum as a public infrastructure for computing and business operations, and what matters to them is the price of gas and the scalability of the network, not the price of the asset.”

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Brody also said EY has taken a “very hard line” against private blockchains and proprietary technology despite what clients may occasionally request.

This also makes the company particularly positive on Ethereum.

“We made a very strategic decision to only build on Ethereum. I have a limited engineering budget. I want us to be the best on Earth at Ethereum – which is the biggest market – not good at 20 other things. The best on Earth, Brody said. “How long will it take for my competitors to adopt this strategy? I really hope for a long time.”