To facilitate secure transactions across the interwebs, a host of banks and technology giants have started to acknowledge blockchain technologies. But, tech companies are now seeing immense scope for this technology in enterprises beyond the finance sector. Thus, they are partnering up to build a private and flexible set of technology standards for business to build applications upon. This is called the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).
This blockchain initiative is being driven by ConsenSys Ethereum studio with participation from founding members — Accenture, IC3, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon, CME Group, ConsenSys, Intel, JP Morgan, Microsoft and Nuco among other Fortune 500 enterprises. It was started back in September last year when a handful of Ethereum enthusiasts got together to develop a common app platform.
The members of the EEA have a common goal — to develop standards and technologies that make it easier for enterprises to adopt the Ethereum blockchain code. In the meantime, they ‘ll work on enhancing the privacy, security, and scalability of Ethereum blockchain to make it better suited for business apps. It’ll further promote and broadly support Ethereum-based technology practices, and a new reference architecture called EntEth 1.0.
Under this initiative, the open-source Ethereum code base has been brought to enterprises by nixing the public code. And this has been an interesting journey for ConsenSys. Due to re-licensing issues, the team failed in their initial attempt to bring Ethereum’s C++ client within the Hyperledger Project. But, it did more good than harm as they were able to build their project out of this initiative. Speaking about this initiative, head of global business development at ConsenSys says,
In the end, things may have turned out better. Instead of being one of many things inside the Hyperledger tent, now we are our own tent. This is an open source foundation. It’s not part of Hyperledger, but it’s like Hyperledger in a sense.
And we have had conversations with the Linux Foundation to potentially add this as its own project, separate and distinct from Hyperledger. It may make sense to have it under the Linux Foundation so they can help with administration aspects.
Other founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance include AMIS, Andui, BBVA, brainbot technologies, BP, Chronicled, Credit Suisse, Cryptape, Fubon Financial, ING, The Institutes, Monax, String Labs, Telindus, Tendermint, Thomson Reuters, UBS, VidRoll, and Wipro, among others. Talking about their participation, Jerry Cuomo, head of Blockchain IBM, said (via IBTimes),
We will participate as visitors. We will go and be productive participants. IBM is behind Hyperledger – 100%, but we are also part of the overall blockchain world community.
We’ll be ambassadors from Hyperledger to the EEA camp with an eye to working with these clients on higher value things on DLT. And also with a view that maybe there are pieces within there that we can interoperate with and share.
In addition to EEA, a cohort of other technology giants have also joined hands to propagate blockchain beyond its financial scope. The said consortium wants to integrate the said tech into Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to make them more secure. And this comes at a time when hackers are using botnet networks to take over our smart devices. It would help build a better and standard platform for developing secure blockchain IoT solutions.
