Ethereum vs Enterprise Ethereum: The Main Difference

Ethereum is a technology for building apps and organizations, holding assets, transacting and communicating without being controlled by a central auth

Ethereum is a technology for building apps and organizations, holding assets, transacting and communicating without being controlled by a central authority. There is no need to hand over all your personal details to use Ethereum - you keep control of your own data and what is being shared. Ethereum has its own cryptocurrency, Ether, which is used to pay for certain activities on the Ethereum network.

However, for many enterprises, the Ethereum public blockchain is simply not a feasible platform on which to deploy a business network. Barriers to enterprise-adoption of the public Ethereum blockchain include issues relating to privacy, scalability, transaction speed, and both the high cost of using the network and the lack of predictability around the cost of using the network.

To address those barriers, a number of Enterprise Ethereum clients were therefore developed. These clients can be thought of as clones of the Ethereum public blockchain but with certain changes made to support Enterprise use cases. For example, fluctuating gas costs in the public Ethereum network must be considered by anyone looking to use the network's resources. In the enterprise context, this is a significant barrier to adoption. However, permissioned Enterprise Ethereum networks can effectively ignore the concept of gas entirely just by setting the default gas-cost to zero. Enterprise Ethereum clients thus conform to the same protocol specifications as the public Ethereum network, but they add features important in the enterprise context such as permissions, privacy, improved throughput, and finality.

The major Enterprise Ethereum clients

Chainstack multi-cloud and multi-protocol Platform as a Service empowering businesses to rapidly build, deploy, and manage decentralized networks and services
Clearmatics Autonity protocol suite that implements p2p protocols and provides client software and infrastructure
Hyperledger Besu Open-source Ethereum client developed under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Java, which includes several consensus algorithms including PoW, and PoA (IBFT, IBFT 2.0, Etherhash, and Clique). Its comprehensive permissioning schemes are designed specifically for use in a consortium environment.
Hyperledger Burrow modular blockchain client with a permissioned smart contract interpreter partially developed to the specification of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
Kaleido full-stack platform for building and running cross-cloud, hybrid enterprise ecosystems
Quorum an Ethereum-based open source enterprise blockchain platform with advanced enterprise grade features enabling privacy, permissioning and performance

The advantages of using Enterprise Ethereum clients

Data coordination. Ethereum’s decentralized architecture better allocates information and trust so that network participants do not have to rely on a central entity to manage the system and mediate transactions.
Rapid deployment. With an all-in-one SaaS platform like Hyperledger Besu, enterprises can easily deploy and manage private blockchain networks instead of coding a blockchain implementation from scratch.
Permissioned networks. The open source protocol layer like, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Besu, Kaleido, ConsenSys Quorum enables businesses to build on public or private Ethereum networks, ensuring your solution fits any potential regulatory and security requirements.
Network size. The mainnet proves that an Ethereum network can work with hundreds of nodes and millions of users. Most enterprise blockchain competitors are only running networks of less than 10 nodes and have no reference case for a vast and viable network. Network size is critical for enterprise consortia that are bound to outgrow a handful of nodes.
Private transactions. Enterprises can achieve granularity of privacy in Ethereum by forming private consortia with private transaction layers. Private information is never broadcast to network participants. Private data is encrypted and only shared directly with relevant parties.
Scalability and performance. With Proof of Authority consensus and custom block time and gas limit, consortium networks built on Ethereum can outperform the public mainnet and scale up to hundreds of transactions per second or more depending on network configuration.
Finality. A blockchain’s consensus algorithm secures confidence that the record of transactions remains tamper-proof and canonical. Ethereum offers customizable consensus mechanisms including RAFT and IBFT for different enterprise network instances, ensuring immediate transaction finality and reducing the required infrastructure that the Proof of Work algorithm demands.
Incentive layer. Ethereum’s cryptoeconomic layers allow business networks to develop mechanisms that both punish nefarious activity and create rewards around activities such as verification and availability.
Tokenization. Businesses can tokenize any asset on Ethereum that has been registered in a digital format. By tokenizing assets, organizations can fractionalize previously monolithic assets (real estate), expand their line of products (provably rare art), and unlock new incentive models (crowdsourced data management).
Standards. Ethereum is where the standards are. Protocols around token design (ERC20), human-readable names (ENS), decentralized storage (Swarm), and decentralized messaging (Whisper) keep the ecosystem from balkanizing. For enterprises, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Client Specification 1.0 defines the architectural components for compliant enterprise blockchain implementations. The EEA is planning to release version 2.0 of the spec soon.
Interoperability and open source. Consortia on Ethereum are not locked into the IT environment of a single vendor. Amazon Web Services customers, for example, can operate private networks with Kaleido’s Blockchain Business Cloud. Like the Java community’s spec-driven philosophy, the Ethereum ecosystem welcomes contributions to the codebase through Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Organizations that collaborate to make Ethereum enterprise friendly

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: The EEA enables organizations to adopt and use Ethereum technology in their daily business operations. We empower the Ethereum ecosystem to develop new business opportunities, drive industry adoption, and learn and collaborate with one another.
Hyperledger: Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology. The foundation has some projects in it that work with the Ethereum stack, including Besu and Burrow.