The collaborative effort that aims to augment Ethereum and enable it to serve as an enterprise-grade technology, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, has been officially launched.

The launch event was held at J.P. Morgan's offices in Brooklyn. 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.

“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 official release said.

The research and development will primarily focus privacy, confidentiality, scalability, and security. EEA will also investigate hybrid architectures that span both permissioned and public Ethereum networks.

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

“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.

According to the official announcement, the 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 Buterin, “I look forward to continuing to work with everyone involved.”