OpsChain is hosted on Nightfall, a Layer 2 rollup blockchain that EY co-developed with Polygon.
EY, one of the big four accounting firms, has launched a supply chain tracking service called OpsChain Supply Chain Manager on Nightfall — a Layer 2 Ethereum blockchain co-developed in partnership with Polygon.
The two firms launched Nightfall’s beta release today, and made OpsChain Supply Chain Manager as one of its first applications for businesses to track supply chains.
OpsChain allows organizations to create fungible or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Nightfall. Rather than acting as cryptocurrencies, these tokens represent assets and inventory within companies that can be traced on the Nightfall blockchain. Data and transactions made by OpsChain users will be much cheaper and faster since they’re not taking place on the main Ethereum blockchain itself, but on a layer above it.
OpsChain leverages Nightfall’s zero-knowledge (ZK)-proofs, a technology that allows for faster and cheaper blockchain transactions while also ensuring privacy. This means that the real transactional data is cryptographically hidden.
According to EY, Nightfall-based OpsChain aims to serve as a tool to help companies track and manage their supply chains on the Nightfall blockchain.
“Managing complex operations across enterprise boundaries is a big step forward. EY OpsChain Supply Chain Manager significantly widens the breadth of use cases available for clients to consider,” said James Canterbury, principal and blockchain leader at EY.
While experts have long touted the use of blockchains in supply chain tracking, the lack of privacy in blockchain-based transactions held back its adoption. However, as OpsChain uses Polygon Nightfall’s ZK proofs, which EY claims useful in preserving the privacy of sensitive data and hence the product will be fit for the supply chain software market.
