A recap of the QualitaX webinar featuring Karen Scarbrough, Executive Director at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).
For years, the question facing enterprises considering Ethereum was whether the technology was ready for them. The infrastructure was immature, the energy consumption was indefensible, the user experience was impenetrable, and the regulatory environment was opaque. A lot has changed. In a recent QualitaX webinar, Karen Scarbrough — Executive Director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and previously in Microsoft’s blockchain team and BP’s innovation group — joined us to discuss the findings of the EEA’s 2024 Business Readiness Report and what they reveal about where enterprise Ethereum adoption actually stands.
The EEA Report: A Snapshot of Enterprise Reality
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Business Readiness Report — now in its third year — is designed to give enterprises a comprehensive, honest overview of what is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem: which use cases are live, which industries are leading, what the technology can and cannot yet do, and where the meaningful challenges remain. It draws on interviews with enterprises across sectors and attempts to provide the kind of grounded, cross-industry view that is hard to construct from press releases alone.
The 2024 edition arrived in the wake of the crypto winter, and one of its more counterintuitive findings was that the downturn did not hollow out the developer community. Developers who had been in the Ethereum ecosystem for more than twelve months largely stayed and continued building. More recently, downloads of Ethereum software development kits have actually increased — a signal that the development base is growing again even before the broader market narrative has fully recovered.
The report also captured the acceleration of real-world asset tokenisation as a dominant theme, with major financial institutions — JPMorgan, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton — making their positions on tokenisation publicly and forcefully. That shift from enterprise experimentation to institutional commitment represents a meaningful change in the credibility of the use case.
The Use Cases Leading Adoption
Karen identified several categories where adoption has moved from proof-of-concept to live deployment:
Capital markets and tokenisation remain the standout. Franklin Templeton’s money market fund on Polygon, JPMorgan’s testing on Polygon, and MakerDAO incorporating real-world assets as collateral for its DAI stablecoin are among the most visible examples. MakerDAO’s inclusion of tokenised real-world assets into its collateral base is particularly significant — it represents one of the largest and most established DeFi protocols extending its model to connect with traditional financial assets.
Real estate tokenisation has seen a notable proliferation of platforms and use cases, with companies building infrastructure to make previously illiquid property assets more accessible to a broader investor base.
Loyalty and consumer engagement represents a different but equally telling adoption vector. Nike, DC Comics, and others have used NFTs and token-based loyalty programmes to create new forms of customer engagement — proving that enterprise Ethereum use cases extend well beyond financial infrastructure.
Supply chain and verification continues to evolve, with GoDaddy’s recent partnership with ENS (Ethereum Name Service) for site validation cited as an example of how Ethereum is beginning to function as a verification layer for internet-scale applications — not just financial ones.
Payments constitute the third-largest category of companies building in the ecosystem by count, with stablecoins enabling cross-border payments and settlements that are faster, cheaper, and more accessible than correspondent banking for businesses in emerging markets.
Why Now? The Infrastructure Investments That Changed the Equation
The question of why adoption is accelerating now — rather than five years ago when blockchain was equally well-publicised — has a relatively concrete answer.
The Ethereum Foundation’s core mission is to produce what it describes as secure block space. Ethereum’s base layer (L1) currently supports approximately 100 kilobytes of block space per block — not a large amount for a global settlement layer. What changed the calculus was the emergence of Layer 2 ecosystems built on top of Ethereum, designed to use that block space far more efficiently by processing transactions off-chain and periodically settling proofs to L1.
The result, as those L2 networks mature, is a projected 100x increase in overall Ethereum throughput — without compromising the security guarantees of the base layer. Layer 2 networks are now attracting significant transaction volumes that would have been economically or technically infeasible on L1. Coinbase’s Base, a consumer-facing L2, is one standout example: it gives Coinbase the ability to host decentralised applications within its ecosystem while maintaining the security properties of Ethereum underneath.
For enterprises, this means the scalability objection — one of the most persistent barriers to adoption — is being systematically addressed. The infrastructure players have invested. The tooling has matured. The question has shifted from “can Ethereum do this?” to “which L2 is right for our use case?”
Security, Recovery, and the User Experience Gap
Two related challenges have historically limited enterprise and consumer confidence in Ethereum: the risk of wallet loss and the complexity of the user experience.
The private key model — where losing your private key means permanent, irrecoverable loss of access to your assets — has no analogue in traditional finance and has been a genuine barrier to mainstream adoption. Karen highlighted account abstraction (ERC-4337) as the most significant near-term response to this. Account abstraction allows wallets to be programmed with recovery mechanisms that are analogous to how you would recover a Google or Apple account — through trusted contacts, multi-factor authentication, or social recovery — without requiring users to manage seed phrases or hardware wallets. This is beginning to appear on Layer 2 networks and represents a substantive shift in the accessibility of Ethereum wallets for non-technical users.
The broader user experience trajectory is illustrated by applications like Friend.tech, which launched on Coinbase’s Base network with an experience that felt like a conventional consumer app. Users downloaded it from an app store, onboarded without managing private keys in any visible way, and participated in a blockchain-based social application without needing to understand what was happening underneath. That level of abstraction — making the Ethereum infrastructure invisible to the end user — is what mass adoption requires, and early examples suggest it is achievable.
The Sustainability Question: Now Settled
The environmental impact of Ethereum’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism was a significant reputational and practical barrier for enterprise ESG programmes. Karen noted that the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake — completed in September 2022 — reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by over 99%. Current energy consumption is, by orders of magnitude, lower than major internet applications like YouTube or Netflix.
This does not mean environmental diligence is no longer relevant. But the existential sustainability objection to enterprise Ethereum adoption has been removed. Karen cited Shell’s partnership with Gitcoin — donating $500,000 to be distributed through quadratic funding across sustainability projects chosen by the Ethereum community — as an example of how enterprises are now engaging with the ecosystem’s values, not just its technology. Quadratic funding is worth noting on its own terms: it is a mechanism that mathematically levels the playing field between small and large donors in community funding decisions, giving individual preferences comparable weight to large institutional contributions. Shell’s use of this mechanism represented a genuinely novel form of corporate-community co-investment.
Geographic Adoption: Not US-Centric by Default
Karen drew a historical parallel worth considering: approximately 27% of all websites are hosted in the United States. She does not expect the Ethereum ecosystem to follow that pattern. Several jurisdictions have moved faster and more decisively on regulatory frameworks that enable enterprise Ethereum adoption: the UAE, Singapore, and the European Union (through MiCA) were all cited as standouts. The UK is also actively developing its framework.
The observation that is most strategically significant: no single jurisdiction or regulator can determine the success or failure of a global, permissionless ecosystem. Enterprise adoption will flow to the jurisdictions that provide the most workable environments, and those jurisdictions are competing for that activity. For multinational enterprises evaluating where to pilot tokenisation or settlement infrastructure, this competitive regulatory landscape is actually an enabling condition — not just a compliance complication.
There is also a broader sovereignty dimension to this conversation. Ethereum and permissionless infrastructure offer jurisdictions an alternative to dependence on US-based cloud providers and technology platforms for critical digital infrastructure. Several countries and regions are explicitly evaluating public blockchain infrastructure through that lens — as a way to provide citizens and businesses with digital services that are not controlled by a foreign private company.
The Ethereum Mainnet as Settlement Layer: What It Actually Means
One of the more conceptually significant findings in the report is the growing recognition of Ethereum mainnet as a settlement and base layer — not just as a blockchain for smart contracts.
Within the Ethereum ecosystem, this has a specific technical meaning: L1 is the final arbiter of transaction validity. Layer 2 networks process transactions off-chain, but they periodically submit proofs to L1 that allow anyone to verify that those transactions were processed correctly. L1 is the “Supreme Court” — the place where disputes are ultimately resolved and finality is achieved.
Outside the ecosystem, this framing carries a broader ambition: positioning Ethereum’s security and finality guarantees as equivalent, for certain purposes, to the settlement finality provided by traditional financial market infrastructure. Karen was measured about the timeline — drawing an analogy to the decades of work that went into building the Swiss financial system — but clear about the direction. The convergence of permissioned token standards (such as ERC-3643), privacy layers, and Layer 2 scalability means that enterprises can now access the benefits of public infrastructure while meeting the regulatory compliance requirements that were previously only achievable on private networks.
Protocols like Uniswap adding compliance layers to their architecture illustrate this convergence in practice: the same infrastructure that previously served the permissionless DeFi world is now being adapted to serve regulated financial institutions.
Challenges for 2024 and Beyond
Karen was direct about the challenges enterprises face as they navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem:
L2 proliferation and selection is the most immediate practical challenge. The explosion of Layer 2 networks has created a landscape that is difficult for enterprise teams to navigate — each L2 carries different tradeoffs around security, decentralisation, tooling maturity, and tokenomics. Enterprises now face a genuine architectural decision that did not exist two years ago, and the right answer depends on specific use case requirements that most enterprises have not yet fully defined.
Privacy remains an ongoing workstream. Zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption offer paths to privacy-preserving computation on public networks, but these are not off-the-shelf capabilities. Deploying them requires specialised expertise, and they are not yet as accessible as other parts of the Ethereum stack.
The SME accessibility gap was a theme Karen and Anaïs explored together. The current ecosystem is still oriented primarily towards large enterprises with dedicated innovation teams and the resources to engage with technical complexity. For the broader business community — SMEs, non-financial companies, organisations without blockchain expertise — the level of abstraction is not yet sufficient to enable safe, confident adoption. The analogy to eBay’s early days is instructive: eBay launched when there were no secure internet payments, and it validated its model by asking customers to mail cheques. The Ethereum ecosystem needs similar low-risk entry points that allow smaller organisations to test what works without requiring deep technical investment.
Quantum readiness was flagged as a longer-horizon challenge that the Ethereum ecosystem is already addressing. The roadmap includes a path to post-quantum resistant digital signatures for wallets — replacing the current signature schemes with ones that are secure against the capabilities of future quantum computers. For enterprises thinking in decade-scale infrastructure terms, the fact that Ethereum’s research community is already working on this is a meaningful signal about the seriousness of the long-term infrastructure commitment.
Key Takeaways
- The EEA Business Readiness Report provides enterprise-grade evidence of real adoption across capital markets, supply chain, loyalty, payments, and real estate — it is a practical resource for enterprise teams making the case to internal stakeholders
- Layer 2 scalability is the infrastructure investment that has unlocked the current wave of adoption — 100x throughput improvement is achievable, and the tooling is maturing rapidly
- Account abstraction (ERC-4337) is bringing web2-style recovery and user experience to Ethereum wallets — addressing one of the most persistent adoption barriers for non-technical users
- The sustainability objection is resolved: proof-of-stake reduced energy consumption by over 99%, putting Ethereum below the energy footprint of major internet applications
- Geographic adoption is not US-led: the UAE, Singapore, and the EU are competitive regulatory environments, and no single jurisdiction controls the outcome
- Ethereum mainnet as settlement layer is increasingly the framing for institutional adoption — supported by the convergence of permissioned token standards, privacy layers, and L2 infrastructure
- The SME accessibility gap remains the most significant barrier to broad adoption — the ecosystem needs more abstraction, simpler tooling, and lower-risk entry points for non-enterprise organisations
- Post-quantum readiness is on the Ethereum roadmap — a signal that the core research community is building for decades, not just for the next cycle.
The EEA Business Readiness Report is available in full at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance website. Organisations interested in joining the EEA and contributing to standards development are encouraged to reach out directly.