The cooperation is expected to contribute significantly to the overall development of Ethereum.

Ethereum, a new database technology similar to the blockchain, is essentially a shared, secured ledger of transactions, where records can’t be easily modified. It also allows for so-called smart contracts.

Nowadays, many companies are developing private Ethereum networks to adopt them to such diverse areas as supply chain tracking, payments, data privacy, compliance, asset tokenisation and many others. Perhaps, it will take little time for investment banks to fully migrate securities clearing and settlement to Ethereum networks.

As far as there are some challenges in adopting Ethereum, no wonder that many companies are aiming at cooperation.

As a result, some king of alliance has been formed to advance the adoption of Ethereum blockchain database technology in corporations. JP Morgan, CME Group, BNY Mellon, Banco Santander, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, Wipro and British Petroleum, among others, have been working on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance for months. Reportedly, they are planning to launch the alliance later in February.

“By banding together the key adopters, supporters and shapers of enterprise usage of Ethereum, we are seeking to provide a platform not only for the technology, but also to provide the governance and tools to create a standard for ‘Enterprise Ethereum’. It is a group of builders & doers, developing sufficient governance for enterprise requirements but not ‘death by committee’ and without ‘pay to play’. Some of our collaborators have noted the refreshing nature of this approach and the pace of technical progress that is achievable from working off a single standard and open source code base”, Jeremy Millar, Chief of Staff at ConsenSys and a chief instigator of Enterprise Ethereum, says. “Moreover, Enterprise Ethereum will build upon the current Ethereum scaling roadmap and maintain compatibility and interoperability with public Ethereum.”

So far, there are not many details about the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. However, Millar reveals that more formal information regarding the many stakeholders who are already forming Enterprise Ethereum will be released soon.

The launch of this consortium clearly demonstrates that Ethereum is gaining popularity. Many companies are working on the technology even though it lacks many features that companies need to widely deploy it.

“In fact, we believe Enterprise Ethereum will contribute significantly to the overall development of Ethereum”, Millar says.

The consortium could speed up development of these features so that more companies could adopt Ethereum. That, in turn, could put Ethereum on top among other blockchains. The aim is to shape best practices and enterprise requirements related to handling transactions, as well as privacy and security.