EP 23 - Paul Brody of EY - This ain't your daddy's "Ernst & Young" - How EY is building a crypto practice that helps all of DeFi

Guest Info

Name of Guest: Paul Brody
Name of Project: EY
Twitter URL of Guest: https://twitter.com/pbrody
Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/EY_US
Project URL: https://blockchain.ey.com/

Show Notes

How he got started and became the Global Blockchain Leader at EY 

How he got into blockchain and EY

While at IBM:
Talked about connected devices like light bulbs and how their clients were selling them and they were losing money from cloud services.
So they decided on blockchain and spoke to Vitalik Buterin about it.
That project convinced him that blockchain was all he wanted to work on. IBM wasn't interested, but EY was.

He laid the groundwork for EY, that it was going to go up and down and needed them to stay with it whenever it goes down or up.

He got a 5-10 year commitment from them 5 years ago.

Polygon partnership is a direct outcome from that investment over the ups and downs.

How large companies get excited about things and expect big revenue and then realize they have to wait or call it a failure.

How he really set expectations.

How they decided what EY would be doing in blockchain

Went through a large number of options.
Had a blank sheet
Were going to focus on external, not internal.

Most difficult decision was private or public blockchains and decided that public was only way, but that privacy of what they do is critical. They need privacy in their competition. Cannot be open on chain.

Didn't think that private would ever work so they adopted Public - but.

They decided on Ethereum and to be the best at Ethereum.

They decided to invest heavily in privacy. Hired researchers and cryptographers.

Could only choose 1 platform. Decided couldn't mess with any others and he thinks it paid off.

How he had to convince partners at EY to give away millions of dollars in research as open source.

Nightfall

Had to protect the actual transaction and then also make sure that the asset and transfer are private and then they are working on Starlight which allows making business logic private.

Optimistic rollup with privacy and best in class costs.

Polygon partnership

Polygon approached them to deliver as one of their layer 2 solutions.
Says they are very smart about how they engineer things
Scaling support.

User experience

Fast, low cost and private.
Ecosystem of buyers and sellers.
No disclosure of transaction data.

Starlight

Zero knowledge compiler
They have prototype right now
Can tag variables that need to remain private.
Now adding more complex logic.
Now adding enterprise level logic.
Entire contract on chain for widgets and price, etc. and you couldn't see it. So private procurement agreement running privately on public blockchain.

Customer Offering

Complex applications for businesses.
Multi-party

Doing a procurement system for XBOX/Microsoft on blockchain with smart contracts. Reduces 45 day process for paying game developers to 5 minutes.

How the blockchain solves the big problem with ERP implementations and makes tx a level playing field for large and small companies.

Data flows give big guys advantage without disclosing the big player the small players data. This this is one of the key things that will drive adoption and all players meet in neutral territory.

Their Revenue Model For Blockchain

Blockchain analyzer
Consulting
SaaS offerings

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