Newly formed enterprise collaboration drives Ethereum blockchain technology best practices focusing on security, privacy, scalability, and interoperability

NEW YORK, March 1, 2017 - 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 Accenture, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon, CME Group, ConsenSys, IC3, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, and Nuco.

Additional founding members 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.

Many initial members have developed pilots and production environments using Ethereum and bring unique understandings of enterprise needs. These include supply chain provenance tracking, inter-bank payments, reference data, securities settlement, and many others.

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, general purpose decentralized 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 centralized 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.

"Ethereum is already one of, if not the, most widely used technologies for developing and deploying enterprise blockchains. 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," said Jeremy Millar, founding board member of EEA.

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 standardizing 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 Mr. Buterin, "I look forward to continuing to work with everyone involved."