EEA and OpenLaw
Bob Summerwill, ConsenSys�Advanced Digital Innovation Summit�Vancouver
12th September 2017
Bob Summerwill
What is Ethereum?
What is ConsenSys?
ConsenSys is a venture production studio building decentralized applications and various developer and end-user tools for blockchain ecosystems, primarily focused on Ethereum. There is also a large enterprise consulting arm.
Joe Lubin, the Founder of ConsenSys, was a co-Founder of the Ethereum Project.
ConsenSys was founded in 2015 and now has over 300 employees all around the globe. Many remote. Like me! HQ is in Brooklyn, NY.
What is Enterprise Ethereum Alliance?
The EEA was founded in February 2017, to bridge the gap between public Ethereum and the needs of enterprises who are adopting Ethereum. Aim is to build an Enterprise Ethereum standard as an extension of the public Ethereum protocol, addressing the needs of consortium and private chains.��Our belief is that the union of the public and private/consortium use-cases will converge in the next few years and that sufficiently modular code-bases should be able to meet all these needs. The Ethereum Foundation cannot and should not focus on the needs of Enterprises. The EEA exists to meet that need, and to help bring the technology to “Enterprise Grade” in terms of documentation, support, maturity, etc.
EEA members (highlights out of 150+)
EEA Legal Industry Working Group
Chaired by Aaron Wright, Associate Clinical Professor and Co-Director of the Cardozo Law School’s Blockchain Project; Co-author of forthcoming book Blockchain & the Law: The Rule of Code (Harvard University Press 2018)�
NEW YORK, N.Y., USA – August 14, 2017 – Today the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced that 14 leading law firms and academic institutions have joined the EEA’s Legal Industry Working Group, bringing together top, global law firms and leading legal minds to explore building enterprise-grade applications on Ethereum.
EEA Legal Working Group members
Law firms and Academia
Financials and technology companies
OpenLaw (ConsenSys)
OpenLaw is a blockchain-based protocol for the creation and execution of legal agreements. Using OpenLaw, lawyers can more efficiently engage in transactional work and digitally sign and store legal agreements in a highly secure manner, all while leveraging next generation blockchain-based smart contracts.
OpenLaw is the first robust project that actually enables the creation of “smart” legal agreements. The OpenLaw legal markup language provides an easy way for anyone to reference and trigger an Ethereum-based smart contract to manage contractual promises. Using OpenLaw, any Ethereum smart contract can be embedded into a legal agreement in a few lines and automatically triggered once the agreement is digitally signed by all parties.
Open Law - Video
What is going on inside OpenLaw?
Reimagination of $130+ billion U.S. transactional legal market through a collaborative network approach:
a) Intuitive Template Creation and Management (versioning, etc.)�b) Markup Language / Reasoning Engine / Formal Verification�c) Decentralized Storage (IPFS)�d) Smart contract execution (direct interaction with blockchain)�e) Integrated e-signature solutions (using a blockchain for persistent signature storage)�f) Collaborative wiki-like open source repository�g) Familiar feel and tools for risk-averse lawyers
Related Projects
Where to learn more?