A Round of Confidence for Ethereum. Love, the Banking Industry

Enjoy the bounty of these Open Source Stocking Stuffers

A screenshot from JP Morgan Chase’s Cakeshop

It’s a festive season here at ConsenSys. With many of our colleagues coming and going during the holidays, it’s a great time to reflect on the past year and look forward to 2017.

One source of merriment and cheer for the Ethereum community this holiday season has come from an unexpected place; the financial services industry. Traditionally “Financial Services” and “Open Source Software” were two phrases that would only be in the same sentence when reading about litigation or patent battles. However, there is hope that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new era of open source collaboration with our friends in the banking industry.

Most notably, last month JPMorgan Chase announced the release of Quorum, their Enterprise focused version of Ethereum. While the announcement of a new Enterprise platform might not seem that noteworthy, what is worth discussion is the fact that Quorum and all its code was released on Github. Along with Quorum, JPMorgan has released Constellation — a peer-to-peer encrypted message exchange (under an Apache 2.0 license) as well as Cakeshop (see image at top) — an integrated development environment and SDK for Ethereum-like ledgers (again, under Apache 2.0).

While perusing the JP Morgan Chase Organization view on Github, there exists a subtlety that makes these projects extra special. The Quorum initiative is the first ever open source project JPMorgan Chase has contributed to Github. Ho ho ho indeed!

JPMC isn’t the only banking behemoth who is feeling the festive spirit. Santander’s Blockchain Lab has released a gas tracker dashboard to help developers visualize gas consumption on an Ethereum network.

A screenshot from Santander’s Gastracker Dashboard

According to the Reddit post discussing the beta release of the gas tracker, Santander plans to “open source the code shortly, so the community can keep building on what we have created.”

While these are young projects, the fact that banks are beginning to contribute to open source is a powerful sign that the Ethereum platform has plenty of industry support. Paired with Microsoft’s contributions as well as the fact that industry leaders like BHP Billiton are building on Ethereum, these examples show that the Ethereum Foundation is providing strong leadership for the ecosystem moving into the New Year. With more developers joining the project every day, the New Year is looking to be extremely bright for the Ethereum platform!

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Igor Lilic is the Principal Technical Lead at ConsenSys. If you have any questions, email him at igor.lilic@consensys.net.