The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has welcomed 34 members to its initiative that aims to connect enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts.

Cisco, Antibiotic Research UK, southern India's state government of Andhra Pradesh, and Scotiabank are among the new members of the non-profit which was established to build, promote, and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, open standards, and open source reference architectures.

EEA membership now surpasses 150 entities, with the likes of Accenture, BP, Infosys, ING, Intel, J.P.Morgan, Mastercard, Microsoft, National Bank of Canada, Samsung SDS, Scotiabank, Toyota Research Institute, UBS, and Wipro previously signing up to the initiative that went live in February.

Blockchain is a type of digital ledger technology originally conceptualised to facilitate the trading of the bitcoin cryptocurrency. In a nutshell, blockchain allows for the tracking of digital assets so that a level of trust and consensus can be established, and previous transactions agreed upon.

While the bitcoin blockchain is used to track ownership of digital currency, the ethereum blockchain -- a custom-built blockchain -- focuses on running the programming code of any decentralised application. Instead of mining for bitcoin, miners work to earn ether, a type of crypto token that fuels the network.

It is developed by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, which launched its software platform as a crowd funded initiative in late 2014.

The EEA initiative is similar to one facilitated by the Linux Foundation that aims to develop an enterprise-grade, open-source distributed ledger framework and to help identify and address important features and requirements that are missing when it comes to having a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that a hacker had made off with roughly $7.4 million in ether during the initial coin offering (ICO) of CoinDash, a trading platform for cryptocurrencies.

Last week, bitcoin community Bitcoin.org warned that network disruption is expected in the coming weeks which, if traders are not careful, could result in the loss of their bitcoin.