The reports regarding the formation of an Enterprise Ethereum Alliance have been recently doing the rounds.
Latest reports now state that business titans such as JPMorgan Chase & Co, Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp., along with over two dozen other companies are teaming up for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
According to The New York Times, the formation of the alliance is to be announced today. The new organization, a non-profit, will work towards the creation of a standard version of Ethereum software that any business or company can use for tracking data and financial contracts. The member companies want to create a private version of Ethereum catering to specific purposes and which would be open only to certified participants.
Those backing the initiative describe it as a way of ensuring that businesses have other options to use the blockchain technology, besides the IBM-led effort ‘Hyperledger Project’. Similar efforts are also undergoing at R3 and Chain.
“We are pretty equally spending our time across the different chains,” said Alex Batlin, the global head of blockchain at Bank of New York Mellon, which is joining the Ethereum alliance.
Reuters reported that the alliance includes nearly 30 members with the likes of Accenture Plc, Banco Santander, BP Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG, UBS Group AG, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, ING Groep NV, Bank of New York Mellon Corp, Thomson Reuters Corp, and startups ConsenSys and BlockApps.
Although the Ethereum network suffered major attacks since its inception, particularly TheDAO hack in which hacker gained control of over $50 million worth of Ether, its community has been growing. Batlin and others involved in the alliance believe that the way the Ethereum developers handled the attack convinced them of the maturity of the technology.
“In every industry that we come across, Ethereum is usually the first platform that people go to,” said Marley Gray, the principal blockchain architect at Microsoft. “Ethereum has this massive advantage of having the public network that has been tested for two years”.
Ether price has been soaring higher on the news and is currently trading at 15.91 levels at the time of writing (Kraken).
