Two of the world's largest blockchain consortia, Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, announced Monday they will work together to drive blockchain adoption across industries. They have ac
Two of the world's largest blockchain consortia, Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, announced Monday they will work together to drive blockchain adoption across industries. They have accepted each other as associate members. This enables their leadership to collaborate across working groups, special interest groups, meetups, and conferences worldwide.
"This is a time of great opportunity," Ron Resnick, the EEA's executive director, said. He added, "Collaborating through mutual associate membership provides more opportunities for both organizations to work more closely together."
The EEA develops specifications and standards for enterprise blockchain networks built on Ethereum. Hyperledger, backed by the Linux Foundation, builds open source software for establishing, managing, and connecting enterprise blockchain networks.
The partnership sets a specific goal: get Ethereum developers to contribute their enterprise projects to Hyperledger, and encourage Hyperledger maintainers to push interfaces they have built toward the EEA's standards bodies.
Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger's executive director, described it as "a nature alliance for both organizations." He added, "Great open standards depend upon great open source code. Standards, specifications and certification all help enterprise blockchain customers commit to implementations with confidence since they have better assurances of interoperability as well as multiple vendors of choice."
Nick Cowan leads Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange. He called the collaboration "a significant milestone for the wider blockchain ecosystem." Cowan said, "The real winners are the prospective blockchain projects that previously would have had interoperability concerns when deciding to pursue blockchain innovation using Ethereum or Hyperledger." He continued, "This joint effort between two of the largest enterprise blockchain communities is indicative of the collaborative spirit that will accelerate the adoption of blockchain into the mainstream."
Gabriele Giancola, CEO and co-founder of qiibee, a Swiss loyalty token protocol helping brands run loyalty programs on the blockchain, has noticed developers pushing for standards. "This becomes even more relevant as blockchain technology continues to attract wide interest and expands into new industries, which reiterates the need for a regulatory framework. If blockchain is to reach mainstream adoption, there will need to be regulatory standards put into place, but I believe this will benefit the ecosystem as a whole," Giancola said.
The organizations already have projects working toward interoperability. Hyperledger Burrow implements the Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecode interpreter under an Apache license. Earlier in 2018, Hyperledger Sawtooth, which Intel contributed to the project, added support for the EVM as a transaction processor. This work, dubbed Seth, brings Ethereum smart contracts to Sawtooth networks and is now in active use. The developers "anticipate submitting it for conformance testing to the EEA specification as soon as possible."
The EEA's Special Interest Group on Trusted Execution Environments is developing standards that Hyperledger is implementing in a lab project, Private Data Objects.
