Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

April 17, 2019 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- When you think about Ethereum, you likely don’t think about its’ utility for institutions first. Even so, Ernst & Young, which is one of the world’s most powerful auditing firms, has released it’s own business blockchain offering called Nightfall. What makes Nightfall special is it’s overall goal of increasing institutional adoption of the Ethereum blockchain for development.

Reportedly, Nightfall is a protocol that helps companies establish a connection to the Ethereum blockchain for certain use cases like improving their transactional systems and streamlining their supply chains. What is perhaps most striking about Nightfall for the average crypto investor is that it allows companies to conduct private transactions with zero-knowledge proofs on the Ethereum chain.

According to CoinDesk, there is yet another feature that brings the most interesting implication to the table. With Nightfall, EY is also aiming to change the way that blockchain projects are developed to increase collaboration and therefore, further adoption across the space.

In short, they are releasing Nightfall with no software license tied to it at all. This means that anyone can develop it further or even sell it, without making any payments or attributions at all to EY. Since Nightfall was also apparently built to support tokenized goods over digitized documents like the Interplanetary File Storage System or something similar, it’s also important to know why this is the case.

CoinDesk reports that for now at least, the bulk of EY’s efforts will likely be in marketing Nightfall as a solution for improving the tracking of goods from end-to-end of a company’s supply chain, without accidentally, improperly transferring their ownership.

At face value, this particular use case is nothing new. When considered together with the fact that Nightfall relies heavily on the ERC 721 token standard, it is clear, however, that EY wants Nightfall to be the first blockchain that can support the supply chains of many companies at once. If the reasoning behind this is still not clear, just think about the fact that ERC-721 tokens have the ability to help companies distinguish between a representation of an asset and who owns it.

This is important so that items can be tracked without, as suggested above, mistakenly transferring their ownership at the same time. Now, all that stands in the way of EY’s plans is whether businesses will choose to use Nightfall, including whether making it public domain was the ideal choice at the same.

By: BGN Editorial Staff