Ernst & Young Unveils Supply Chain Manager on Polygon Network

Big Four accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young has unveiled its blockchain-based supply chain manager that is built for the Polygon network and that is aimed at solving bottlenecks in tracing products as they come to market.

The EY OpsChain Supply Chain Manager, which is now available in a beta version, is the first joint project between Ernst & Young and Ethereum scaling tool Polygon following the start of their collaboration last September.

The project is aimed at tackling chokepoints along supply chains combining product traceability with inventory management.

Organizations would create tokens to represent assets and inventory, which the OpsChain manager would then track across the supply chain network.

Scaling networks like Polygon are designed to lighten the load on base-layer blockchains such as Ethereum, processing transactions on a sidechain to reduce congestion and costs.

Polygon Nightfall, the network combining the fruits of the two entities' labor, offers zero-knowledge proof-based privacy technology, guaranteeing that only selected parties can see the full history of the assets tracked.

While supply chain management has often been cited as a compelling use case for blockchain technology, enterprises may have been put off adopting such tools because of a lack of privacy in transactions.

"This is exactly the kind of commercial use case we envisioned when we set out to build and deploy the Polygon Nightfall network," Antoni Martin, enterprise lead for Polygon, said. "Enterprise use cases outside of financial services are still not widely developed. Privacy tools open a whole new world for us."

Read more: Why Blockchain Benefits the Supply Chain