In the first episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Paul Brody, Global Blockchain Leader at EY where he drives EY's initiatives and investments in blockchain technology across consulting, audit, and tax business lines.

Paul is also a Board Member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and prior to working at EY was Vice President and Global Industry Leader of Electronics at IBM.

Episode highlights:

• The prototype system, ‘Adapt’ that Paul built and how IBM not wishing to take it further inspired him to leave and join EY
• His role in developing blockchain within the organisation
• Why Paul is such an advocate for public blockchain
• Why there is a lack of privacy with public blockchains and the problems this causes
• The reasons you can’t migrate applications built on private blockchain to public
• Why he sees blockchain as transformational technology
• The issues around forming and working with a consortium
• The differences between permission and permissionless blockchain and the problems Paul sees with permissioned
• The key differentiators between trust anchors and trusted third parties
• The two initiatives; Nightfall and Starlight Paul is currently working on
• How Paul believes the future landscape for Web3 technologies will look

Key Takeaways:

• We had created this product, we had pitched it to IBM leadership and they were not interested. They didn't want to go any further than the prototype, and that was at the point where I parted company with IBM because I wanted to do this. - Paul
• We see this over and over again, people created these centrally run private blockchain business models and they just didn't work. - Paul
• We've had this vision of a value proposition where you can basically take any kind of business application and run it on a public blockchain, any kind of B2B transaction. But the reality has been that we can't do it. - Paul
• There will be many stablecoin firms, there will be many audit firms, there will be many external data sources at Oracles. We will have to decide to trust some of them in how we build our transactions, but none of them will become central intermediaries. None of them will become monopolists. None of them will have overwhelming power in the ecosystem. - Paul
• My goal is that in January of 2023 we will launch the first production versions of both Nightfall and Starlight as production betas on the public Ethereum main net. - Paul
• What's really cool about X.509 certificates is they are themselves public open standards supported by many different third party providers. So nightfall will remain truly public and permissionless. - Paul

Resources:

• Hyperledger
• Corda
• EY Nightfall
• EY Starlight

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