As various uses for blockchain push the technology's accepted legitimacy forward, VMware has officially staked a claim in driving its enterprise adoption, launching the company’s VMware Blockchain for Ethereum, currently in beta. 

According to the release, the Ethereum technology stack – including Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), smart contracts, APIs, and developer tools – is the widest-ranging stack to building blockchain networks. However, according to the VMware, "there are several critical gaps Ethereum platforms have that make them difficult to use for enterprise use cases, such as lack of robust privacy and scalability for complex workloads, governance mechanisms, and enterprise-class operational support characteristics." These gaps prompted the vendor's efforts to help users build out more enterprise use cases.

"Over the last several years, we have seen customer’s application architectures evolve from being monolithic to being distributed,” Senior Director of Blockchain Go To Market at VMware Josh Lory told SDxCentral.

“We are on the cusp of an evolution in application architecture: decentralized, multi-party applications running on enterprise-grade blockchains networks that power new digital asset experiences,” he continued.  

With zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based privacy capabilities, the EVM compatible platform will “support standard Ethereum APIs, commonly used development tools such as Truffle, Hardhat and Remix, and wallets like MetaMask," according to the release.

Breaking down the wax and wanes of blockchain’s reception boils down to three main issues according to Lory: fluctuating cryptocurrency values [and scams] associated with blockchain technology, lack of overall awareness to the technology’s benefits against a centralized database, and its early stage within the enterprise blockchain tech cycle.

Lory likened the technology's current position within the cycle to cloud technology a decade ago when “most businesses were afraid to put critical workloads on it.”

Part of the issue behind centralized databases is there are “several untrusting parties” that need to interact to complete a business process. Lory explained that trading a stock needs 8+ parties to complete, a pharmaceutical chargeback involves over 7 parties. “This application type exists across industries and [a] large portion of the global economy is enabled by multi-party applications,” he said.  

Lory also notes that multi-party interactions today are inefficient. “The root cause of these inefficiencies is the underlying technology. Today every party has a siloed view of their world, built on legacy, siloed DB-oriented architecture that requires constant peer-to-peer reconciliation,” he explained. 

“Instead of siloed databases, multi-party applications need a shared, multi-writer blockchain ledger across untrusting entities,” he continued. Lory says this is how multi-party apps end up getting disrupted and what blockchain platforms like Ethereum are going to enable: “new revenue streams, decentralized ecosystems, digital asset experiences, and near instant transaction."

Two of the technology’s early adopters are Bank of Israel and Infosys. Global systems integrator Infosys has been an early adopter of the system for Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) “and is now the first partner to develop a solution on VMware Blockchain for Ethereum,” according to Lory.

Infosys has developed a Vital Records Management Solution for VMware's blockchain system to help government clients modernize their records management. Lory says the solution is available as a 60-day free trial before paid use. 

“We also partner with Accenture and Cognizant to bring strategy, policy, and systems integration along with the platform,” Lory said.

Alongside these partnerships, VMware’s partnership use cases will be a driving demonstration to strengthen blockchain technology’s perceived validity within several functions such as payment rails, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and Stablecoins, NFT Marketplaces, and document verification. “Blockchain provides a single source of truth for multi-party transactions to be processed safely, securely, efficiently, and privately,” Lory explained.