PegaSys today announced the release of Pantheon 1.0 with permissioning and consensus features built specifically with enterprise requirements in mind. Pantheon 1.0 allows users to create private blockchain networks, with new customer support and training offerings. PegaSys, ConsenSys’ 55-person protocol engineering team, is furthering the range of technical offerings and expertise for consortiums in finance, supply chain, healthcare, government, and other enterprise verticals deploying Enterprise Ethereum blockchain networks. 

Pantheon 1.0 is the first Ethereum blockchain client built from the ground up for enterprises in addition to the public mainnet. As a Java-based, Apache 2.0-licensed software client, it is perfectly situated to satisfy the stringent technical, business, and legal requirements of enterprises and governments. Ongoing conversations and sessions with customers and industry working groups that are part of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) have yielded insight into the features required for enterprise-grade production: faster and more secure networks using the licences and languages enterprise developers are most familiar with. This is the first step in enabling large, decentralized networks for many industries. PegaSys’ core mission and long term goals are to enable private networks to work interoperably with public chains, Ethereum mainnet and others. 

“Over the past four years we’ve worked with customers around the world, and whether central banks, industry consortiums, or Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) working groups, we’ve been attentive to incorporating their feedback to create a truly enterprise-ready Ethereum client: Pantheon. Ethereum automates trust and enables automated agreements between actors on a shared IT infrastructure, yet many industries require greater transaction throughput, privacy, and specialized validation features beyond what the Ethereum 1.0 base layer can presently offer. This is the most accessible client to date, which will help enterprises reduce the cost of trust with external parties and create more collaborative infrastructure and cooperative business models going forward,” said Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys.

Enterprise-grade features

Node whitelisting, account whitelisting, and permissioning APIs enable actors to control which nodes are running, and which accounts can send and receive transactions  — features necessary for securing existing financial and network infrastructures. PegaSys’ goal is to create permissioning controls that comport with enterprise IT best practices.

A faster consensus mechanism, Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT) 2.0, ensures a single, agreed-upon ordering for transactions in the private blockchain and also faster settlement finality compared to Proof-of-Work. It can ensure both high data integrity and fault tolerance, as IBFT 2.0 uses a group of validators to ensure the integrity of each block being proposed. A super-majority (~66%) of these validators are required to sign the block prior to insertion to the chain, making block forgery very difficult. The “leadership” of the group also rotates over time — ensuring a faulty node cannot exert long term influence over the chain.

As part of the launch, PegaSys is also announcing a partnership with DrumG Technologies to deliver enterprise-grade distributed applications for financial services using Pantheon 1.1 as the blockchain protocol. "The privacy features and design of Pantheon enable a number of use cases where confidentiality is required in the banking sector, and we're excited to work with the PegaSys team on Enterprise Ethereum," noted DrumG Chief Architect, Marc Sparrow.

A full-range of customer support offerings

PegaSys is committed to Pantheon being open-source, vendor-supported, and enabling the developer community to contribute to its Ethereum client. For this reason, PegaSys will now be offering customer support models to meet individual and consortium-wide needs. From online customer support to dedicated full-time support engineers, different pricing models are available for networks of all sizes.  

“Enterprise support will give our customers the confidence and assurance they need to run Pantheon and Enterprise Ethereum, and also help us roll out better features that enterprises need to get to production,” said Daniel Heyman, Program Director, PegaSys.

Pantheon 1.0 is also available in Azure Marketplace (or direct via Azure Portal) through partnership with Microsoft. 

Compatible with your favorite Ethereum tools

Pantheon works with the most common Ethereum tools and infrastructure, such as Truffle, Remix, web3j, Nethereum, Kaleido and Epirus. Alethio’sEthStats, an advanced block explorer and analytics platform, provides full and accessible transparency into real-time and historical network activity. Alethio's open source version of its explorer is directly integrated with the Pantheon client. Pantheon nodes are also supported by Infura, which bridges hundreds of dApps to the Ethereum mainnet. Financial management of on-chain digital assets can be tracked by a suitably configured implementation of Balanc3. (Tell us what other tools you’d like to use on our Gitter!)

Future Roadmap

The long-term value of enterprise Ethereum is interoperability with the public mainnet, which offers global reach, time-tested resilience, and high integrity. PegaSys is working on practical integrations for enterprises as well as innovative R&D approaches for scaling the public Ethereum Network. The next release of Pantheon 1.1 will offer new transaction privacy features.