Ernst & Young invests $100 million for Blockchain expansion

One of the big four accounting firms, Ernst & Young Global Ltd, is investing heavily in blockchain technology. The company is investing $100 million into the engineering and development of distributed ledger technologies.

Ernst & Young revealed on May 17th, 2021, its second-generation of smart contract & token review tools through its Ernst & Young Blockchain Analyzer product suite, including a testing studio allowing simulated smart contract execution for complex decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

“The new iteration supports multiple new capabilities that are expected to be used in complex DeFi contract ecosystems,” Ernst & Young announced. They also stated, “It offers a blend of compliance testing with traditional code review, and it supports customized smart contract tests and simulation of mainnet transactions.”

Ernst & Young also revealed that Italian beer company, Birra Peroni, is using its Ethereum-based supply chain solution, called the “EY Opschain Traceability.” Peroni is using the supply train tracker to validate the information and to mint nonfungible tokens (NFT’s) to identify and track data for batches of Peroni beer.

Ernst & Young also announced the contribution of source code to a zero-knowledge-proof prototype compiler in the public domain. The firm’s latest ZKP protocol, “Starlight,” was built to address concerns over preserving commercial confidentiality on a shared network.

Alongside Microsoft and ConsenSys, Ernst & Young launched the enterprise-focused smart contract protocol, The Baseline Protocol, in March of last year. The protocol leverages the Ethereum network as middleware while ensuring robust privacy protections for network participants. It is offering enterprises a means to transact on distributed networks without exposing sensitive data to network counterparties.