These days we hear a lot about multinational corporations entering the blockchain space via partnerships with each other. Less known are the blockchain companies, who do not have ties to multinationals, partnering with each other to push blockchain technology.
Last week, Eris Industries selected Ledger as its hardware security partner in the pursuit of bettering the security of critical workflows – that is, back-office processes, a target of many blockchain projects – and protect its blockchain-based infrastructure.
Ledger, a blockchain security provider, offers hardware solutions for consumers and enterprises. Ledger, founded in 2015, first released a best-selling smart card based hardware wallet and entered the B2B market with TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and HSM (Hardware Security Module) solutions.
Eris is building the leading blockchain application platform for industrial uses of blockchain and smart contract technology.
“We work on problems of network level business process automation,” CEO Casey Kuhlman told CCN.com. “Traditional data and process management tooling has automated many internal business processes within industry. However, business processes which need to operate on a network level (i.e., outside of the context of a single enterprises’ data silos) benefit from being operated using a distributed application paradigm. Eris greatly reduces the friction required in building, testing, and operating such applications.” Eris views its partnership with Ledger as bringing a missing piece to their project: a hardened key management solution.
It has never been our intention to become a security company.
“Rather we have been actively working to extend our platform in such a way that it would be highly interoperable with numerous other software and hardware companies from blockchain client builders to key management and security systems.The partnership not only validates our architectural strategy, but it also dramatically enhances the eris platform as more of our users begin to harden their smart contract applications for pilots and moving into production,” he explained.
Ledger CEO Eric Larchevêque notes of the partnership: “Eris Industries is a blockchain solution provider, deploying full systems for their customers. Whether public or permissioned, blockchain technology always relies on cryptographic signature of transactions, and compromission of private keys could result in massive damage. Trusted hardware is therefore an essential part of the architecture, and Ledger has developed a full range of enterprise solutions based on Hardware Security Modules.”
According to the CEO, by integrating Ledger’s technology directly on their server nodes, Eris can provide a secure turnkey solution to their customers.
Ledger recently introduced the BOLOS (Blockchain Open Ledger Operating System) technology, which is the cornerstone of our security solutions.
“Thanks to BOLOS, it’s necessary to write only once the implementation and it can run on TEE, HSM or our new generation devices,” Larchevêque said. “Thus, Eris has been able to start test drive immediately our trusted hardware security features using a simple smartphone based TEE, before deploying them on HSMs.” Ledger’s focus includes hardware wallets for consumers and enterprise with other projects, including on Internet of Things.
Eris Industries’ open-source Eris Platform is an enterprise-grade blockchain application development platform, and is the only blockchain application platform available on not only Microsoft Azure, but also the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Casey Kuhlman, CEO of Eris Industries, is excited to move forward with the partnership.
“Ledger is at the forefront of providing tools to secure blockchains and manage private keys, said Kuhlman. “Ledger’s BOLOS platform is a crucial security offering which fills a vital security gap in the blockchain ecosystem. We are therefore very pleased to be working with Ledger, and together we will provide our users with the most flexible, capable, and user-friendly application development tooling in the market today.”
Ledger’s first product, Ledger Nano, is a smart card based Bitcoin wallet available in more than 100 countries.
Eris markets its Universal Blockchain Platform, which strives to allow individuals and businesses build secure, low cost, run anywhere application with blockchain and smart contract technology. Eris strives to automate data-driven processes and relationships with distributed technology.
Eris Industries views Bitcoin not as a network of value transmission, but, instead, a “shared software database.”
COO Preston Byrne highlights on his website that, in the Eris blockchain view, there can be blockchains sans digital currency, as is the case with Bitcoin and other common models. Thus, instead of highlighting bitcoin’s value transfer applications – those bitcoins are priced pretty high right now – the company wants to revolutionize data management and security. Eris views its consumer as the developer.
The company once demonstrated a way to decentralized the Bitcoin Foundation. Its focused has evolved over the years towards smart contracts such as demonstrated by Ethereum.
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