On Thursday (13 December 2018), one of the world’s largest consulting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers (trading as “PwC”), announced that it was joining forces with blockchain company Bitfury Group to build a blockchain accelerator in Russia with the goal of meeting the needs of PwC’s Russian enterprise clients.

PwC, which is headquartered in London, United Kingdom, ranks as “the second largest professional services firm in the world behind Deloitte,[5] and is one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, EY and KPMG.”

Furthermore, PwC is no stranger to blockchain technology. In fact, as the press release noted, PwC’s specialized external training arm, PwC Academy, has already used Bitfury’s “extensible framework for blockchain projects”, Exonum, for some of its training courses and seminars.

Exonum is “designed to allow people, companies and governments to design custom private or permissioned blockchains that benefit from the unmatched security of public blockchains.” Here are some of its main features:

  • BFT Algorithm: “Exonum’s Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm excludes single points of failure and makes your blockchain solution resilient against node crashes or bad actors.”
  • Anchoring: “Anchoring data to Bitcoin network protects Exonum against history revisions by leveraging the tremendous security of the Bitcoin Blockchain.”
  • Light Client: “All received information is validated on the client side with the help of Exonum light client, securing clients against MitM attacks.”
  • Rust: “To achieve top levels of security, performance and concurrency, Exonum uses the Rust programming language, and offers Java-binding for Java developers as well.”

According to a report on a study by PwC titled “Blockchain Opportunity for Energy Producers and Consumers,” the “introduction of the blockchain technology will fundamentally change the modern economy and approaches to financial transactions.” For example, this study found “a decrease in personnel and infrastructure costs due to the automation of business processes using smart contracts for blockchain.”

Viktor Nelin, the manager of IT consulting services for PwC in Russia, stated:

“Definitely, PwC, as one of the leading consulting services companies in the Russian Federation, is confident that the blockchain technology will allow creating both services for internal corporate use, by expanding the functionality of current products, and fundamentally new business models for mass segment. With Bitfury, our efforts to develop blockchain solutions for corporate customers using the Exonum platform will provide fundamentally new products and solutions to companies in various industries.”

And Dmitry Ufaev, head of Bitfury in Russia, had this to say:

“Our mission is to make blockchain technology as widespread as possible, and we are happy to work on this together with one of the leading consulting companies. A partnership of such a level proves that the technology will develop and in the next few years large-scale blockchain solutions will be implemented in different segments of the economy and business. Bitfury has an undeniable technological advantage in the development of blockchain platforms for the corporate sector in the territory of the Russian Federation. We are confident that our joint experience with PwC will strengthen the blockchain market and open up new prospects for development.”

 

Featured Image Courtesy of PwC