Until this week, few would have expected that two out of the three major blockchain consortiums will come together to develop joint standards for enterprise blockchain systems.
However, on Monday, October 1st, the Hyperledger project and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) released a joint statement that they will join each other’s association as associate members.
Reason for the Partnership
While EEA maintains a global standard for the adoption of ethereum, Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort pioneered by Linux Foundation, to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.
By joining forces, both organizations with over 700 members between them hopes to accelerate the adoption of enterprise blockchain technologies. A blog post co-authored by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger and Ron Resnick, Executive Director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance read:
“What we hope to get across to the public is that anyone who ever put a ‘versus’ between EEA and Hyperledger got it wrong; it’s now conclusively ‘EEA AND Hyperledger’.”
According to the post, “[the] relationship will enable Hyperledger developers to write code that conforms to the EEA specification and certify them through EEA certification testing programs expected to launch in the second half of 2019.”
Collaboration between Hyperedger and Ethereum
Members of the EEA can also implement their standards in collaboration with Hyperledger Labs or any of its major projects.
Seth, the support of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on the Hyperledger Sawtooth, is one of these instances. Included this year, Seth allows decentralized apps (DApps) and smart contracts developed on the Ethereum blockchain to be used on Sawtooth-based networks. Support for EVM is also available in Hyperledger Fabric while Hyperledger Burrow project is a licensed implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode interpreter.
Rivalry with R3
An equally influential blockchain consortium is R3, which has over 200 member organizations. Although Resnsik said he has invited them to join the alliance, there’s no indication they will agree to join. Firstly, they have maintained a strong rivalry with both the EEA and Hyperledger. Secondly, Resnsik explained that R3 is not really an ‘open source’ standard rather an ‘open core’ standard.
Solomon Sunny is the market reporter for Smartereum, one of the global leaders in Ethereum, blockchain and currency news. He produces technical price updates on digital currencies and writes recent developments about blockchain.
