Background

Big companies want to coordinate with their suppliers and customers, but nobody wants to put their purchase orders on a public blockchain. Baseline was the answer to that: use the Ethereum mainnet as a shared, tamper-proof reference point while keeping every company's actual data inside its own systems of record. Zero-knowledge proofs let two parties prove they agree on a workflow step without either of them revealing what's in it.

EY, ConsenSys, and Microsoft announced the initiative in March 2020, and it launched as an OASIS open source project a couple of weeks later, backed by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

What I did

I was the technical lead from the ConsenSys side, working alongside designers, developers, and cryptography experts from Microsoft and EY. Together we designed and built the first zero-knowledge-proof-based decentralized protocol for verifying complex, multi-party supply chain workflows. Getting three companies' engineers to agree on a reference implementation is a project in itself.

After launch I stayed on as a core maintainer and a member of the technical steering committee, helping guide the project and grow the community around it. The specification went on to become an OASIS standard track document.

Things I learned

1. "Boring is the new exciting" turned out to be the right pitch. Enterprises don't want magic; they want their existing ERP to keep working.
2. ZK circuits are only half the problem. The messaging and coordination layer around them is where most of the engineering lives.
3. Open governance is slow on purpose, and that's fine.

More at baseline-protocol.org.