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Welcome to Future of Finance, where Fortune asks prominent people at major companies about their jobs, how their firm fits into the crypto ecosystem, and what this all means for how we use money.

The following is from a recent conversation with Paul Brody, the global blockchain leader at EY and author of the upcoming Ethereum for Business: A plain-English guide to doing business on the worlds largest blockchain.

Brody is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a CoinDesk contributor, and has done stints at IBM and McKinsey. He also has a soft spot for Swedish Fish.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

So youre writing an Ethereum book?

Im getting there. I started in December. I wrote like 10 chapters, and it was really, really tough. And now, theres, like, six chapters left? The format of the book is how Ethereum works and whywhy public blockchains are so important for businessspecifically why theyre more important than private blockchainsbusiness use cases, procurement, supply chain management, tokenization, carbon footprint, and why it takes so long for enterprises to adopt technology.

When you were at IBM you did some Internet of Things stuff, and some other projects that were cutting edge. Is this sort of a pattern for you, where you want to do the cool new thing? Is that just whats most appealing to you?

The thing is, I am very driven by intellectual curiosity. I dont necessarily go after every single new thing, but when I find a thing thats really, really important, I go after it. When I was in collegeIm dating myself hereI was like, Wireless! Wireless is the thing! I went to work as a summer job at the first mobile network operator in Africa, in Nigeria, and I took an entire year off to work for them before I came back and went to work at McKinsey, where I can remember just telling colleagues, Mobile data, youve got to invest in mobile data.

The best perk of being a VP at IBM was you had access to IBM research. And I had a couple of amazing products, and before I did the one that got me into crypto, I did another one, which was immensely fun, around 3D printing. A lot of people do these corporate white papersthey just do a survey, they present it like its subjective data that nine out of 10 executives think that not burning down the planet is a good ideathey present it as if its factual data, and its not really. What I love to do is get a couple layers below that, and whats really fun is, for instance, wed ask, Okay, 3D printing will transform manufacturing, but how will it transform manufacturing?

What happened with thatthe 3D printing?

We picked three productsa smartphone, an electric razor, and a washing machineand we tore them down, literally one piece at a time, evaluated every single component, scanned them in 3D, and then tried to remanufacture as much of the product as possible using a 3D printer. And that was amazing. We came back with specific data on the carbon footprint of 3D printing, the cycle time with 3D printing, we built the economic model of what your manufacturing scalesits quite transformational. And the next project I did after that was IoT.

How did that lead you to Ethereum?

So Im out at Samsung, talking to the head of the multimedia solution center, and hes like, Paul, we are going to go broke, the cloud is going to bankrupt usyouve got to come up with a better plan. I thought to myself, this is really bizarre. Imagine a really smart light bulb with the brains of an iPhone, and its connected to WiFi. What is your iPhone processor doing? Like nothing, 99% of the time! So why on earth are we paying all this money to maintain massive cloud data centers, when your refrigerator could be providing cloud services, or your phone? So I called a bunch of guys and was like, We should be able to make a cloud of computing devices that manage themselves, right? The cloud should be in the devices.

Halfway through this project, colleagues were like, I want you to think about using this thing called Bitcoin, because its distributed computing. And weve had lots of debateson the one hand, its very computationally intensive, but then on the other hand, its not like these machines are doing anything else. So John Cohn, an IBM distinguished engineer, comes and says, Paul, Ive met this guy, I think youd really like him. His name is Vitalik [Buterin]. And he wants to do Bitcoin, but instead of for money, for computing. So we built this thing called ADEPTAutonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry, sort of this decentralized cloud infrastructurefor Samsung, with help from Vitalik. And we showed it at CES in January 2015. Thats how I got into Ethereum. Thats how I got into blockchain. And at that point, I was like, this is going to be absolutely revolutionary.

What important lessons or ideas from other projects or jobs have you applied to ones on the blockchain?

Were heading toward this world where the marginal cost of almost everything is zero. One of the most brilliant things that I heard when I worked at McKinsey was if you want to think about the future, try to imagine some important process or input is free. Just imagine, like, what if electricity was free? What if airfare was free? What if phone calls were free? Like 25 or 30 years ago, this idea that phone calls would be free, it was ridiculous. And yet, we sort of forget. One of the reasons we liked Ethereum was it comes with account payments and smart contracts. And we used to joke that we dont know what anybody will actually pay for in the Internet of Things, but, eventually, someone will figure out how to monetize it. And when they do, theyll be so glad this architecture has payments and contracts built in.

Has embracing the blockchain helped EY from a competitive standpoint?

In the world of audit, we only have three competitors. So my fair share of any sort of global audit market is 25%, but its actually been better than that because I dont think any of our peers have taken this space quite as seriously as we have.

So where is this leading? Can you tell me more about plans for the blockchain?

A lot of tech systems are natural monopolies. Thats just how they are in a world where the marginal cost is zero for products. And then with Metcalfes lawthe value of a network grows along with the number of participantsat a certain inflection point, your network becomes so valuable youre effectively a natural monopoly. And thats hugely shaped our strategy here because it led me down the path to believe there can be only one winning blockchain. There cant be 50, cant be 100, and it almost certainly will be a public blockchain. All paths lead to a dominant chain. And when you look at the history of computing platforms, that dominant chain usually becomes clearly visible within a decade of an ecosystem starting.

And Ethereums that winner?

Ethereum was really the only programmable smart contract chain out there that was really dominant. So I said, Okay, were making a play. Its a theory, a bit of the GE mentality where if I have a limited budget, am I going to spread it around, am I going to be okay with a bunch of different blockchains? Or am I going with the best?

What prevents the rest of the Big Four from just copying what youre doing at some point?

Obviously, in a decentralized system, you cant do that. And thats really tough. Ive long accepted that. Even if we win this race, there will be no moment where we can just put our feet up and say, Well, were a monopolist now. Great. We will have to keep running hard.

When clients come to EY, is it more often, Oh, hey, by the way, we hear you have this blockchain guy? or do they walk in like, Were here because of the blockchain guy?

It comes in both forms. All the time, Ill sit down with clients, and theyll come over, like, We had no idea you guys knew how to do this stuff. And thats great. I love that. And it makes me very happy. And, absolutely, you know, our senior people, its great when somebody writes to the chairman and says, I just had this guy, Paul Brody, come in and talk to my clientstotally blew their minds. Like now they think of UI differently.

So whats nextboth on your end, and more generally when it comes to the future of finance?

If you were to boil down all of our aspirations into a single sentence, it would be this: We believe that blockchain will do for networks and enterprises what ERP did for organizations. It was transformational. Before ERP, the left hand and the right hand didnt really know what was going on.

With smart contracts on the public blockchain, I can create tokens that represent all the assets, that connect the buyers and the sellersand that automatically enforce the processes. Like if you have a volume discount rule, when you achieve your targeted volumes, it automatically gives you a discount. This sounds like a small thing, but, actually, it just happens. No one has to remember. And think about an insurance contract, like in health care, and how after your deductible expires youll be referred to specialists, and then the logic just gets more complicated, more challenging. So my goal is to get to the point where we can take any arbitrarily complex business agreement and run it on the public blockchain.

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Future of Finance: EYs Brody on why tech history shows there can be only one winning blockchain - Fortune