Today consultants EY announced two extensions to its blockchain offerings. Its EY OpsChain now has an API that enables businesses to perform public blockchain transactions via an API without managing a blockchain node. Secondly, it unveiled its OpsChain Supply Chain Manager, a privacy solution for public blockchains.
API for NFTs, but not just art
The application programming interface (API) means that corporates can mint, transfer and burn tokens on either the Ethereum public blockchain or the main Polygon network, which has far lower transaction costs. Initially, only non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are available, but it plans to support fungible and hybrid tokens as well.
Bear in mind that NFTs aren’t just for artwork and collectibles. For example, luxury companies that use blockchain for provenance sometimes use NFTs as a digital passport for luxury items. So a watch passport might include when it was created and provide the previous ownership history.
Italian newswire ANSA, an existing EY client, has used the service. “The EY OpsChain API services made the blockchain interactions very simple for our use case,” said Marco Beltrame, Chief Technology Officer, ANSA. “This helped us focus our efforts on building a great end-user experience because all the blockchain back-end was supported by EY teams.”
Run the supply chain on a public blockchain
Another new EY offering is the OpsChain Supply Chain Manager for product traceability and inventory management. The offering incorporates a privacy solution on a public blockchain.
Tokens can represent assets and inventory as they pass through the supply chain network with privacy protection and a link to off-chain data.
EY previously developed its Nightfall zero-knowledge proof technology that’s used for privacy. An entirely new blockchain network, Polygon Nightfall, is being launched based on that privacy technology. The network is a layer two solution leveraging the security of the Ethereum blockchain.
The new solutions come precisely a year after EY committed $100 million to blockchain and crypto-asset research as well as engineering services.
