Baseline protocol is a recently announced initiative that launched as an OASIS open source project on March 19, 2020 and is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, as well as supported by fourteen founding companies (and others that joined the effort shortly after the launch — a full list of the contributors is available here). 

What Baseline is all about is using the Ethereum public mainnet as a common reference between systems and enterprises (going to include traditional corporate systems of record, any kind of database or state machine, and even other blockchain models or distributed ledger technologies). It proposes that as a way to reduce capital expense and other overheads while also facilitating operational intergrity and helping automate business processes across different companies — an approach is designed to appeal to security and performance-minded technology officers.

The protocol will also support tokenization and decentralized financial services in a manner that doesn’t reveal corporate assets or activities to unauthorized parties. Baseline protocol can perform its core tasks on the public Ethereum network at a reasonable rate expected to e sufficient for working with supply chains, business-to-business (B2B) contracting, CRM (customer relationship management) and other domains that involving  coordinating records between legally separate entities. Ethereum 2.0 will further expand and optimize the range of possible and available applications and could operate at acceptable levels of performance and reliability. 

Used correctly, the public mainnet can be employed by businesses and industries to solve long-standing problems along the lines of:

• Automate B2B agreements without the necessity of creating new silos
• Flexibly integrate new relationships with existing ones without losing integrity, interoperability or bloating and increasing complexity by adding integrations on top of other integrations
• Enforce consistency between parties’ records without having to migrate data or business logic from legacy systems
• Enforce continuity in a multiparty workflow while compartmentalizing which parties know which details in each step of the process

In the end, from the perspective of the Baseline protocol, the important thing about the mainnet is that it can become, like the Internet, a widely-used public good. While there aren't all that many details at present, it's clear the the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) could develop to become a big deal in various industries and businesses — with various Hyperledger projects implementing it as well as J.P. Morgan (with their modified Ethereum permissioned blockchain called Quorum) and Runtime Veifications Inc. developing IELE as a universal virtual machine for the blockchain.