J.P. Morgan, Chase, Intel, Microsoft, Banco Santander and other firms have established an alliance to develop solutions for financial companies using Ethereum blockchain.
A group of major banks and tech companies, including Microsoft, Chase, Intel and JP Morgan, have partnered to develop a financial technology based on the digital currency network Ethereum. The organization will work on building a standard version of the Ethereum technology that will be used to track financial agreements and other data.
The members of the group include Banco Santander, BBVA, Credit Suisse, UBS, Bank of New York Mellon, CME Group, Accenture, Thomson Reuters, ING, Cryptape, Fubon Financial, Thomson Reuters, ConsenSys and BlockApps, among others.
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), which was first announced earlier this month, will build standards and technology to simplify the use of blockchain Ethereum by large enterprises. The group is focused to deliver an improved scalability, privacy and security of the technology.
“Ethereum is already one of, if not the, most widely used technologies for developing and deploying enterprise blockchains,”said Jeremy Millar, founding board member of EEA, Finance Magnates reported.
“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.”
Meantime, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin commented: “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. I look forward to continuing to work with everyone involved.”
Some members of the alliance have already used the technology to develop blockchain-based applications. A few months ago, JP Morgan created a system for confidential transactions called Quorum.
Ethereum uses blockchain to record and verify transactions without the participation of third parties. The technology enables the automation of different type of things, including financial contracts and identity management. If compared to bitcoin, Ethereum is more flexible due to its capacity for smart contracts.
The launch of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance will help to improve the lowering credibility of Ethereum, which was involved in a huge hacking attack this summer. In June, DAO, an organization built on the Ethereum blockchain, lost 3.5 million of ether as a result of an attack.
With the new initiative, the group joins a list of other organizations formed by major companies to investigate blockchain use cases. The New York-based startup R3 CEV already includes about 70 companies working together on creating blockchain applications for the financial industry.
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