The blockchain lead at Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) Paul Brody said that his company wants to be “the best on earth at Ethereum–which is the largest market– not pretty good at 20 other things.”
Brody also stated that Ernst & Young is “all in public blockchains”. Recalling EY’s involvement in crypto, he emphasized how the company was indeed one of the earliest adopters in the traditional finance world.
In 2015, EY published a blockchain division to pursue work on public blockchains. The firm initially worked with private blockchains too but that has really decreased over the years.
Brody also shared that EY is building applications and tools in this space. For example, its own blockchain audit platform can do both on-chain and off-chain transaction reconciliation.
EY’s security team in Israel has created a smart contract testing tool called EY Ops Chain which uses tokenization for traceability and transparency within supply chains, and a Zero Knowledge (ZK) Optimistic Layer 2 Rollup for affordable transaction privacy for the enterprise.
This latter tool was donated into the public domain and refashioned into Polygon Nightfall. Last year, EY collaborated with Polygon protocol and framework to provide the EY blockchain solution on the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem.
As per Brody, approximately 65% of EY’s work in blockchain revolves around audits. The remaining part includes NFT tools, food traceability, and improving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. The company is currently building a carbon offset marketplace and carbon tracking tools.
