Richard Humphreys |
The world’s most advanced enterprise and startup blockchain innovators have formed an alliance to build, promote, and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, standards, and a reference architecture, EntEth 1.0.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) seeks to augment Ethereum, enabling it to serve as an enterprise-grade technology, with research and development focused on privacy, confidentiality, scalability, and security.
EEA will also investigate hybrid architectures that span both permissioned and public Ethereum networks. The founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance rotating board include Microsoft, Accenture, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon, CME Group, ConsenSys, IC3, Intel, J.P. Morgan and Nuco.
“We are proud to announce our participation as a launch partner with EEA in addition to making the first reference implementations of Ethereum available in a public cloud,” said Marley Gray, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Blockchain Engineering in a blog post. “Ethereum was the first blockchain supported in Azure and it is evolving to address the needs of enterprises globally. Focusing on requirements like privacy, permissions and a pluggable architecture while retaining its public roots, Ethereum continues to widen the scope of what developers, businesses and consortiums can achieve.”
“Ethereum is already one of, if not the, most widely used technologies for developing and deploying enterprise blockchains,” said Jeremy Millar, founding board member of EEA. “Enterprises love the availability of open-source implementations, a single standard, the rapidly growing developer ecosystem, and availability of talent. But enterprises expect resilient secure systems and a robust controls environment. EEA aims to bring these together, both to provide enterprises the forum they need and also to advance Ethereum generally.”
Ethereum is a blockchain-based, general purpose decentralised application platform, enabling smart contract functionality. It employs the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language to directly implement and execute peer-to-peer and multiparty agreements among other applications. This technology facilitates more efficient and secure transactions without centralised intermediation. Notably, Ethereum blockchain technology will improve banking trade settlement latency, increase transparency in supply chains, and create peer-to-peer markets where intermediaries typically were previously needed between counterparties.
EEA will collectively develop industry standards and facilitate open source collaboration with its member base as well as the Ethereum chief scientist and inventor, Vitalik Buterin, and is open to any members of the Ethereum community who wish to participate. This collaborative framework will enable the mass adoption at a depth and breadth otherwise unachievable in individual corporate silos and provide insight to the future of scalability, privacy, and confidentiality of the public Ethereum permissionless network.
“The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance project can play an important role in standardising approaches for privacy, permissioning and providing alternative consensus algorithms to improve its usability in enterprise settings, and the resources the project and its members are contributing should accelerate the advancement of the Ethereum ecosystem generally,” said Buterin. “I look forward to continuing to work with everyone involved.”