EY invests $100 million to expand blockchain product suite, launches DeFi contract simulator

Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young is continuing to invest heavily in blockchain, investing $100 million into engineering and developing distributed ledger technologies for a range of enterprise applications.

On Monday, EY revealed its second-generation of Smart Contract & Token Review tools through its EY Blockchain Analyzer product suite, including a testing studio allowing simulated smart contract execution for complex decentralized finance applications.

“The new iteration supports multiple new capabilities that are expected to be used in complex DeFi contract ecosystems,” EY announced, adding:

“It offers a blend of compliance testing with traditional code review, and it supports customized smart contract tests and simulation of mainnet transactions.”

Yael Tamar, co-founder of asset tokenization firm SolidBlock, recounted using the new studio to review smart contracts for property-backed security tokens, stating: “It was very beneficial to simulate how our contracts could perform on the network prior to deployment and test the contracts against widely known attacks in this market.”

EY also revealed that Italian beer company Peroni is using its Ethereum-based supply chain solution, “EY OpsChain Traceability.” Peroni uses the supply train tracker to notarize company information and will mint nonfungible tokens to identify and track data for batches of Peroni beer.

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

Speaking to Cointelegraph last week, Baseline executive director John Wolpert emphasized the efficiency savings and unique utilities offered by blockchain technologies across the supply chain.