The World’s Two Largest Enterprise Blockchain Groups Join Forces

by Lucas Mearian,   Computerworld

Hyperledger, an open source collaborative under the auspices of The Linux Foundation, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a blockchain standards organization, have announced a collaboration on promotion and development of open source, standards-based, cross-platform blockchain technology.

[ Further reading: What is blockchain? The most disruptive tech in decades ]

Says EEA’s Ron Resnick, “The EEA is focused on driving a community of organizations around a common set of standards and then certifying applications against those standards.” Through their respective member companies, the partners will collaborate across diverse special interest groups, working groups, and conferences worldwide, linking developers in both communities.

The heart of the EEA’s specification is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is part of the protocol and plays a crucial role in the system’s consensus engine, or the way data entries are approved by members, according to Resnick.

Developers can create applications that run on the EVM using friendly programming languages modeled on existing languages like JavaScript and Python. For example, in 2017, Hyperledger launched the Hyperledger Burrow project, an Apache-licensed implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that can automatically execute scripts to prevent denial-of-service attacks.

While best known as the foundational technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain can be thought of as a database built on a distributed, peer-to-peer topology where data can be stored globally on thousands of servers – and anyone on the network can see everyone else’s entries in real-time. Therefore, it’s virtually impossible for one entity to gain control of or game the network because other users would become immediately aware of the attempt.

There are two kinds of blockchain: public and private. A public blockchain, such as bitcoin, allows anyone on the network to see every other data entry. Entries are only allowed after approval from a consensus of members and all new data are immutably connected in a chain to previous ones. In other words, blockchain is a write-once, append many electronic ledger.

By comparison, a private or permissioned blockchain is centrally administered, typically by a company, which can control who joins the network and determines permissions while on it. Enterprise blockchains are permissioned blockchains, such as Hyperledger or Ethereum.

Resnick says EEA community members developing specifications and standards can utilize Hyperledger to collaborate on software deployments of those standards. Read the report.