The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has secured the backing of tech giants Intel and Microsoft for its new reward tokens system. The consortium introduced its latest rewards scheme at Devcon 5, the yearly conference for Ethereum developers that are currently ongoing in Osaka, Japan.

The EEA is a blockchain league comprised of more than 450 enterprise companies like Accenture, Cisco, ING, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Santander. The group is tasked with developing standards for Ethereum-powered blockchain applications in business.

The EEA announced that it had designed a new reward token system intending to incentivize and reward businesses that are actively engaged in the organization.

Michael Reed on the Topic

According to Michael Reed, blockchain program manager at Intel, there are three kinds of tokens on hand – a reward token, a penalty token, and a reputation token. These can be used with any consortium to encourage teamwork.

He said that they’re holding the EEA consortium as an example. Reed explained that with this software development group, they’re attempting to prompt activities like adding to specifications, editing, developing, and contributing to the code. Conversely, they can also levy penalties for unfavorable actions, like missing deadlines, non-contribution, lack of review, etc.

The concept of using tokens to coordinate companies pursues a long-standing mindset within the Ethereum user community. Vitalik Butarin’s interest in notions like futarchy and the initial experimentations with decentralized autonomous groups proved how strong this idea manifested. This style of tokenization allows organizations to utilize economic bets and voting to influence decision-making.

Blockchain-Powered from Austria

A good example is Austria’s plan to develop a blockchain-powered token as part of Vienna’s incentive program. The Vienna token would allegedly be given as a reward for providing feedback about the city. Citizens can also get the tokens as gratitude for using their bikes or for using an app designed to pay for parking.

The reward token is also the first use case to spring from the Token Taxonomy Initiative (TTI). The initiative started in Microsoft as a way to enact a typical structure for tokenizing value across a broad array of blockchain networks. It can ideally be used beyond the EEA group or the Ethereum system.

Companies like ConsenSys Solutions, Envision Blockchain, iExec, Kaleido, and PegaSys were also involved in this build.

The TTI acts like a workshop. With it, companies can decide on the features they want the token to have. For instance, they can choose it to be transferable or non-transferable, if it’s fungible or not, and what networks to use, whether it’s Ethereum, Hyperledger, or R3 Corda.

