Ethereum in the Enterprise: The Next Chapter for VMware Blockchain

We are excited to share a new strategic chapter in VMware Blockchain’s journey to deliver a robust, enterprise-class decentralized trust platform for multi-party applications. One of our guiding principles has been to give customers choice and flexibility in the blockchain ecosystems they can leverage to build their applications. Delivering on this principle, we enhance the enterprise-class VMware Blockchain to support the Ethereum / EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) ecosystem. In this post, we will share our vision of how an enterprise-focused blockchain platform can augment the Ethereum ecosystem and make it more accessible for enterprise innovation.

Bringing Ethereum to the Enterprise

Since its inception, the Ethereum ecosystem has developed rapidly in terms of technical innovations, number of developers, and application development tools. This in turn enabled existing use cases such as DEXs, lending and other DeFi primitives to mature and allowed new use cases in gaming, collectibles, NFTs and Web3 to emerge. Increasingly, we see enterprise customers wanting to leverage this rich ecosystem to build next-generation enterprise networks, yet unable to do so because enterprise-centric gaps remain in the current ecosystem. Listening to our customers, we identified four core gaps: privacy, scalability, governance and supportability. These four holes are precisely the areas where VMware innovates. The purpose is to create symbiotic benefits: to allow businesses to leverage the richest blockchain ecosystem while augmenting that ecosystem with business needs. Let’s examine each gap and understand why it’s critical to enterprise use cases and VMware’s approach to addressing it.

Privacy

In many multi-party enterprise workflows, it is common to allow competing parties to perform transactions on a given platform. However, different parties may need different levels of access based on the type of transaction (for example, in a privacy-preserving token transfer, the blockchain network should only learn that the token transfer value is preserved, but nothing beyond that). In a blockchain network without these restrictions, proprietary information that forms the basis of a party’s business model would be open, and no party would use such a network. This is one of the gaps most often encountered by business customers. Unfortunately, many privacy solutions are either too naive (providing privacy via channels without providing trust) or not scalable (zk-EVM privacy, although promising, is still in its early stages).

VMware’s vision is to seamlessly integrate privacy-preserving functionality with EVM without trading off trust. Our approach leverages zero-knowledge proof and lightweight multiparty computation via a novel virtual contract abstraction. This abstraction leverages precompiled contracts to handle cryptographic complexity while giving developers a clean interface to build their own Solidity contracts. With this approach, transactions are secured by the blockchain network without compromising the privacy of the transactions.

Scalability and performance

It is widely known that scalability is one of the core challenges of blockchain. This is even more pronounced for enterprise use cases where transactions are more complex than simple token transfers, which often require lower latency and occur at higher throughput. As a result, this has direct implications on the predictability of transaction costs, which is a key business consideration. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches the industry uses to achieve scalability: Layer 2 solutions, sharding, and new parallelized languages ​​and VMs. There are complexity, fragmentation, and cold-start ecosystem disadvantages (tools, development expertise, and lack of composition) with these three approaches.

Given the rich ecosystem benefits EVM provides, our approach is to use this VM and scale our platform using a new approach to efficiently comment transactions that commit limited resources and allow for optimistic parallel execution. Similar to software transactional memory approaches, this approach provides vertical scalability. For horizontal scalability, we explore Byzantine consistent broadcast techniques. In addition, our scalability and privacy solutions were designed together to bring both of these important features of EVM to enterprise customers.

management system

While many use cases can run on open blockchain networks, there is a set of enterprise use cases where the infrastructure must enable a set of known entities that have the authority (sometimes legal obligation) to control network membership, complete transactions, and resolve disputes within the Network. While current enterprise blockchains focus on adoption of the blockchain network as a form of governance, feedback from our customers has been that governance between multiple business entities spans much more than this basic notion of access control.

VMware’s approach is to leverage both smart contract-based governance actions to control network membership, as well as a powerful BFT reconfiguration framework. It enables upgrades, key management, addition/removal of consensus members, and other operational tasks to be performed in a trusted and authenticated manner (ie, operations performed with Byzantine trust guarantees by a set of untrusted operators). Together, these approaches provide enterprise customers with rich, yet easy-to-use management capabilities that meet most business requirements.

Supportability

Software failures are bound to happen, regardless of the robustness built into blockchain systems. In settings where business-critical applications run on blockchains, enterprises need SLO-powered global support services to mitigate the risk and impact of such failures. Given the current landscape of nascent blockchain software, along with few global support options, this is another common gap enterprise customers have raised as a barrier to blockchain adoption.

VMware’s approach is to bring the aforementioned technical innovations around privacy, scalability and governance to the EVM ecosystem and leverage VMware’s world-class global support infrastructure. This will enable enterprise customers to adopt these new innovations and put applications into production with the confidence that a global brand is behind their software platform.

To realize our vision

We intend to realize the above vision (basically) by providing a platform that companies can use to build and operate their own EVM compatible chains. Accompanying the platform will be a Developer Kit, a set of SDKs that developers can use to build dApps that leverage the privacy, scalability, and governance features highlighted above and run those dApps on the VMware Blockchain platform. We aim to deliver the platform and developer kit incrementally, with the first beta announced. As we move forward with the delivery of the platform, we will integrate with best-in-class partner technology providers that specialize in wallets, developer tools, oracles and other components to simplify development and operations lifecycles.

Concluding remarks

VMware is working hard to innovate and build the world’s most robust enterprise blockchain platform. We are very excited about the next chapter of expanding this platform into the Ethereum ecosystem. Like some of the big brands that already work with us, enterprise customers can now build their next-generation, EVM-based applications on this new and innovative platform. Stay tuned for additional announcements about products, partnerships and case studies that we will publish soon.

Customers interested in joining the VMware Blockchain for Ethereum beta program can click here to apply. For more general information about VMware Blockchain for Ethereum, please click here.