What Role Does The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance Play?

When it comes down to the galaxy of cryptocurrencies, the Ethereum is shining bright as ever.

Much of its vital promises are essentially based on the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum blockchain/ By putting it simply, and the smart contracts enable the parties to easily conduct transactions and even exchange the value amongst themselves quite easily utilizing Ethereum. These types of transactions may simply not be limited to the entire finance industry only.

For instance, the Ethereum blockchain can easily streamline various transactions in the commercial real estate by means of providing a much more simplified as well as quick view of an essential snapshot of vital information like credit history as well as property details to easily expedite the processes. It can easily streamline various Enterprise IT solutions too. 

Hence, before we jump into Ethereum Enterprise Alliance or EEA, we should try to understand what Ethereum really is.

Ethereum is essentially a decentralized platform for applications that run quite exactly as programmed without any certainty of censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

In non-technical terms, it is quite typically an open-source as well as a decentralized blockchain platform for smart contracts and applications. Also, it has its own cryptocurrency called the Ether, which is the crypto-fuel to perform operations on the entire Ethereum blockchain easily. It essentially utilizes EVM or Ethereum Virtual Machine in order to compile codes that are written in the native language of Ethereum, Solidity. Also, as the code is duly executed on the blockchain, essentially it can’t be even tampered or manipulated with.

Now, let’s look at EEA.

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

Essentially, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance actually connects Fortune 500 companies, enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with different Ethereum subject matter expertise holders or experts. By working together, they learn from and build upon the only actual smart contract supporting blockchain which currently runs in real-world production which is Ethereum in order to define the enterprise-grade software which is capable of handling the highly demanding, most complex applications at high speed of business and its processes.

Basically, the EEA is a group that consists of a group of companies of different shapes as well as sizes.

Alliances such as this are quite important groupings of various industry players, some of which are active users of Enterprise mobility solutions, which will help smooth the road of Ethereum for its widespread adoption.

The worldwide acceptance of Ethereum has been quite gradual but consistent as well as steady and even though its technology is still in its early stage and will need to overcome several major roadblocks and offer a solution to a wide range of issues of its prices dropping before it actually completely become fully functional for business purposes and dealings.

Actually, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance is just a start. This alliance is an effort in order to customize Ethereum for different industry players. Its members consist of an eclectic mix of many large as well as established organizations in their corresponding industries such as:

1. Microsoft, Intel, Samsung (Technology)
2. Santander, JP Morgan Chase, Scotiabank (Bank)
3. Shell, BP (Oil and Gas)
4. Mastercard (Payments)
5. Bank of Canada (Central Bank)
6. Accenture, Consensys (Consulting)
7. Thomson Reuters (Media)
8. Deloitte (Accounting)

Role of Ethereum Enterprise Alliance 

This alliance’s partners will essentially help developing foundations for use cases within different industries like post-trade settlement as well as supply-chain tracking.

The main aim of the EEA is to essentially provide a detailed and proper roadmap that distinguishes the entire enterprise features and even provides resources that will allow the businesses to learn about Ethereum quickly easily. In order to make it quite easier for businesses to easily leverage the blockchain technology of Ethereum in addressing given particular industry use cases is among the primary concerns of this particular alliance.

Read the blog- 5 things to consider in assessing a mobility solution for the enterprise environment

It is worth noting that the EEA is essentially aimed at the “private” corporations which may have had problems in utilizing the actual open-source Ethereum technology. But, the group uses public features along with the private network. Hence, it brings out the meaningful interoperability, which means that it has developed dApps on the public network which can run on a particular private network such as Quorum of JP Morgan. It is one of the most advanced private networks on par with artificial intelligence programming.

The EEA would certainly like to see many numbers of industrial uses cases essentially being employed on the entire Ethereum network. It is vital that the EEA has actually developed a particular framework that campaigns to see certain uniformity in the industry-wide governance for different enterprises that seek to utilize the platform. Thus, it is essentially a positive initiative for the overall adoption as well as the implementation of smart contracts too.

Also, the platform allows for the usage of the ledger for the actual creation of different decentralized applications along with deployment as well as the execution of smart contracts.

Essentially, the EEA has the innate potential to attract many businesses to the entire public blockchain easily. The EEA even offers the Ethereum blockchain legitimacy. Also, it provides confidence in the corporations as well as businesses. Just look at the giants like Microsoft and JP Morgan to know that Ethereum has vital support. Even though they may not support the utilization of Ethereum as an investment tool, but still they are promoting the technology. Hence, these sentiments will certainly boost the value of the coin.

Also, the EEA is a vital aspect for the entire Ethereum community to easily learn from the form and companies which have experience dealing with governments all over the world. Hence, in essence, it assists to give the platform a presence in the entire era of different regulatory concerns.

Essentially they have developed a multi-layer architecture stack. It comprises of five layers.

1. The base layer consists of a peer-to-peer network protocol layer.
2. The second one is the core blockchain layer. It is responsible for consensus as well as the execution of transactions along with data storage. It will consist of both on-chain as well as off-chain solutions.
3. Now the third layer is privacy as well as the scalability layer.
4. Then, the fourth stack comprises of the tooling layer. It will handle aspects such as permissions as well as oracles.
5. The last layer is the application layer. It is a particular milestone which once achieved will essentially benefit the entire public Ethereum blockchain as most of the developers see a huge amount of potential in the public chain. The development of these layers is quite similar to enterprise application development. 

As we know, Ethereum or ETH remains to be an open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency but it isn’t actually run by the EEA. However, EEA still continues to play a major role in its overall development.

EEA Purposes on Blockchain

Essentially, the EEA is actually designed to serve the three basic purposes of its blockchain.

At first, it will certainly become governance as well as a standards body for the enterprise applications of Ethereum. Customization of smart contracts to easily work in the organizations essentially requires permissions as well as access levels from different disparate entities.

Read the blog- How SharePoint is Helping Enterprises Become More Efficient

This alliance will actually design a particular framework for the entire industry-wide governance as well as the implementation of different smart contracts with various inputs from the members. It will certainly make it quite easier to transfer the real-world transactions onto a particular blockchain.

In the second place, it actually aims to retain the compatibility with as well as enhance the public Ethereum. In case the smart contract of Ethereum is to reach their actual business potential and change the entire way people conduct transactions, in that case, its public blockchain needs to include contributions from a wide range of stakeholders. Also, the alliance actually aims to plug in different new features that are based on the various use cases that are developed in house and even contribute to the roadmap of Ethereum.

Finally, the third stated purpose of this particular alliance is to make sure that rapid and swift technical innovation, as well as enterprise-grade governance, occurs. Familiar frameworks, along with standardization of different technical requisites, will certainly clear the roadblocks for the different developers interested in actually innovating within the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

Also, Ethereum can easily benefit from the experience of the alliance in dealing with different government regulations. Basically, most of the technology startups, dealing in artificial intelligence development, essentially work in the environments which is unfettered by the constraints of the government. Hence, through their actual years of experience in dealing with the governments as well as regulatory bodies, different members of the alliance have developed various strategies that are useful for working within the set constructs of government regulation. Hence, such institutional knowledge can easily assist the member startups to easily deal with various regulatory bottlenecks as they actually scale their entire operations.

The Partnership of Hyperledger and EEA – Impact on Enterprise Blockchains

Recently, Hyperledger as well as Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, popularly known as EEA, finally announced that they are actually becoming members of each other’s major projects. Both of the organization are signing as an associate member of each other, specifically.

This consortia already count different companies as well as projects within their entire respective membership lists. Also, they are both completely dedicated to the diffusion of adoption of the blockchain technology as well as putting the decentralized solutions right into the hands of the various member organizations, some of which lead in artificial intelligence app development.

Even though both of them share similar missions, basically this particular announcement actually represents the overall convergence of the two closely related but separate massive initiatives within the entire enterprise blockchain space. 

The mission of EEA is actually centered around obtaining open standards. Essentially, the goal of the group is to deliver a standards-based, open architecture as well as specification in order to speed the adoption of Ethereum. Also, it describes itself essentially as the first standards organization in the entire Ethereum ecosystem. 

Considering the history of open standards, it is quite a big deal for the entire Ethereum community and especially for the blockchain industry, certainly as a whole. Basically, in most of the technological ecosystems, there is a bit of difficulty to get all of the stakeholders to actually agree on a particular common set of given software standards as well as architecture specifications that are necessary for making sure that the software or the particular hardware to be built by one given organization is actually compatible with the products of the other organization.

Hence, in the case of the blockchain industry, universal standards are quite harder to achieve as most blockchain communities are highly decentralized by their inherent nature. Hence, the purpose of such standards organization such as EEA is to actually solve this particular challenge by the creation of a universal set of already agreed-upon practices which everyone will certainly follow whenever designing blockchains as well as blockchain applications. Hence, open standards assist in ensuring that one project remains compatible with blockchain built by some other organization.

However, Hyperledger essentially oversees the different open source projects which help the developers to create blockchains or various blockchain applications. Also, its inherent missions are actually to promote open source code in the entire blockchain space. Hyperledger itself is overseen by none other than the Linux Foundation, which believes in the actual importance of the open standards. However, they aren't cored part of its actual mission.

Through joining forces, the Hyperledger, as well as EEA, are ensuring that open standards, as well as open-source code, can easily develop side by side in the entire blockchain industry. It is quite significant as it is quite possible to have open standards without actually having open-source software and vice versa. 

However, the partnership doesn’t mean that everyone will adhere to all of the standards as well as source code that is promoted by these organizations. Certainly, there are no laws that actually says you need to abide by the Hyperledger or EEA or anyone else whenever you are building a blockchain protocol or any application. However, this partnership will certainly encourage more openness at different levels altogether.

Now, the question arises that does Ethereum even need a business alliance or not. Well, in this regard, there are various things that need to be considered. Let’s look into it.

Is there a Need for Business Alliance for Ethereum?

At present, there are three things that need to happen to clear the space for smart contracts of Ethereum in the entire industry.

1. The technology of Ethereum, which is actually still in its nascent stage has to mature. Also, security is quite an important and essential pre-requisite for business apps. In the case of Ethereum, hackings at exchanges as well as ether thefts have certainly generated headlines even as the foundation of blockchain works out the kinds within its entire system.

However, the problems have only acted to dissuade the enterprises using enterprise mobility solutions from actually adopting the particular Ethereum technology. At present, the current governance standard for this technology also needs some work. For instance, the community is already in a particular dispute over a recent proposal which makes it quite easier to retrieve lost funds simply over the given public blockchain.

2. This one is related to the first problem. Various changes have to be made to the public blockchain of the Ethereum in order to make it quite suitable for usage in the enterprises. It is quite important as any corporate initiative to create a smart contract platform needs to have certain import rules as well as transaction history data from a given existing database. Also, for instance, a bank would certainly require transfer associate rules along with loan recipient's history before it actually starts recording different transactions and even generating particular smart contracts on the blockchain of Ethereum. The main problem is the technical one along with a philosophical disconnect.

Essentially, most of the information concerning the transactions are stored in the private database silos of small as well as large companies. It presents a problem for a particular consensus protocol like Ethereum, in which every node needs to replicate information from the source databases to verify as well as validate the particular future transactions. It is because different external factors essentially come into play, from data source to network latency to each node, and even to integrity of data being actually transmitted by the source to every given node. 

3. Various governments all over the world have yet to create a regulatory framework for the purpose of dealing with these small contracts. Also, if and when these particular rules are actually put into place, the entire Ethereum community as well developers will face difficulty in dealing with their inherent implication as they will encompass different industries including finance which is highly-regulated.

Conclusion

The entire Ethereum technology is certainly in its nascent stage and needs to overcome different roadblocks which consist of technical as well as regulatory ones before it essentially becomes completely functional for the purpose of business dealings. Various alliances like Enterprise Ethereum Alliance are essential groupings of different industry players which will assist smooth road to widespread adoption of Ethereum.