In the ever-changing digital landscape, the complexity of business interactions and transactions between different organizations is increasing. Traditional ERP systems are not well-equipped to handle these streamlined workflows with external partnerships and multi-party collaborations. Conventional strategies also face challenges in integrating digital business processes across organizations, such as manual data reconciliation, expensive integrations, high latency, and scalability constraints. The Baseline Protocol offers a new solution to these challenges by ensuring secure, private, and streamlined data synchronization across parties. It uses zero-knowledge cryptography to share data while adhering to data protection standards such as GDPR and CCPA. The protocol also follows zero trust principles, enhancing security measures. It facilitates interoperability among enterprise systems, creating secure multi-party workflows that transcend organizational boundaries. By acting as a middleware layer between different enterprise systems, the Baseline Protocol ensures data consistency without revealing sensitive information, reducing reconciliation costs without compromising security in multi-party business interactions.
The Baseline Protocol is a collaborative open-source project managed by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and supported by Oasis. It aims to advance secure and private digital business coordination among multiple parties. The technical specification of the protocol is currently being enhanced and refined to become an official standard recognized by Oasis. The Baseline Reference Implementation 3 (BRI-3) plays a crucial role in advancing the protocol and serves as a blueprint to illustrate its practical application. It helps ensure consistency and adherence to the intended design and serves as a guide for other implementations. BRI-3 is designed to provide clarity and simplicity while explaining the intricate layers of the protocol. It encourages wider adoption from the open-source community of developers and enterprises and adopts a vendor-agnostic approach for adaptability across platforms.
BRI-3 will also lay the groundwork for Baseline Protocol Software Development Kits (SDKs), simplifying the process of creating Baseline Protocol applications for developers. It paves the way for demonstrating interoperability between different Baseline Protocol implementations, a crucial step towards standard approval. The development of BRI-3 has been supported by the Baseline Protocol 2022 Grants Program, and the achievement of Milestone 4 marks its entry into the Beta phase.
In the Beta version of BRI-3, the focus is on the baselining of invoice data. It allows counterparties to digitally exchange invoice documents while selectively shielding sensitive information. The implementation includes state storage and merkelization to capture the evolution of state objects over time. It also introduces a Virtual State Machine (VSM) for processing state change requests in a privacy-preserving and verifiable manner. Transaction execution and zero knowledge processing ensure the correct application of business logic and generate cryptographic proofs for tamper-proof timestamps.
Milestone 5, the final milestone for BRI-3, aims to complete in the first half of 2024. Planned features include improving solidity contracts, implementing pre-compiled circuits, and resolving technical debt.
For upcoming news and demo announcements, visit the Baseline Protocol website and follow their social channels. The Baseline Core Devs Community welcomes readers and developers to explore the implementation and engage in ongoing innovation within the Baseline Protocol ecosystem.
