Dive Brief:
- Two of the world's largest blockchain organizations have joined forces to facilitate the creation of blockchain-based enterprise tools, according to a press release.
- The two groups are The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), an organization of global standards that drives the adoption of Enterprise Ethereum and Hyperledger, an open source blockchain initiative designed to help industries build and adopt tools that use blockchain.
- "The big open standards depend on a big open source code, so this is a natural alliance for both organizations," said Hyperledger's executive director, Brian Behlendorf, in a statement. "The standards, specifications and certifications help all corporate blockchain customers to commit to implement with confidence as they have better interoperability guarantees and more choice providers."
Dive Insight:
Blockchain technology has many applications within organizations, but its ability to transform the supply chain through greater efficiency and tracking ability comes from cooperation between different players. To do this on a large scale, developers must comply with common standards to ensure interoperability between systems.
The AEA provides standards-based specifications to do just that with members like JP Morgan Chase, Intel and Accenture.
Hyperledger members have access to "general accounting frameworks and enterprise-level open source code bases" and include finance players, banks, the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chains and production chains. Existing members include Accenture, Airbus, Daimler, FedEx, Honeywell International, IBM and SAP.
The EEA-Hyperledger partnership will offer members a wider range of resources to use in developing blockchain-based tools and greater assurance that all the tools they create will be compatible with other software they may need to interact with the rest of the line – paving the way for more investment in blockchain-based instruments.
Until this partnership, the two organizations were seen as competing, encouraging companies to choose one or the other. (Microsoft was with EEA and IBM was with Hyperledger, for example)
"For anyone who has ever put a" between Ethereum and Hyperledger, this collaboration shows that it is now "Ethereum AND Hyperledger", "said Behlendorf. "We expect developers who build heterogeneous business technologies to be motivated to present projects to Hyperledger, and we hope that the project maintainers will consider the adoption of factual interfaces that are suitable for standardization to the relevant group of special interest in the EEA ".