Two of Blockchain's Biggest Consortiums Just Joined Forces

Announced Monday, the Hyperledger Project and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance have agreed to collaborate on bringing common standards to the blockchain space and cross-pollinate a wider open-source community.

This joining of forces is notable as EEA and Hyperledger represent two of the three largest and arguably most influential enterprise blockchain communities, the third being the R3 Corda ecosystem.

Further, for Hyperledger's 200 member organizations, there is now the promise of interacting with tokens and smart contracts on the ethereum public chain.

Stepping back, Hyperledger was founded as an umbrella organization - cast in the image of the Linux Foundation - for open source blockchain development, comprising a number of protocols designed specifically for enterprises.

Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger's executive director, told CoinDesk that the EEA's work on standards and attempt to align a whole universe of different vendors into a common enterprise picture is very complementary to Hyperledger.

Sawtooth proponent Dan Middleton was recently elected chairman of Hyperledger's technical steering committee and Seth awaits "Conformance testing to the EEA specification as soon as possible," according to the joint statement by Hyperledger and EEA. Meanwhile, EVM work is also now underway with Fabric, arguably Hyperledger's flagship protocol.

As well as the working with the EVM, Hyperledger developers also want to keep a close eye on decisions being taken within the ethereum community around using WebAssembly, a coding standard for web pages, to potentially make the next generation of the public blockchain protocol more JavaScript-orientated.

R3, which boasts more than 200 members and partners across multiple industries, clearly views EEA and Hyperledger as its competitors.

In a recent interview, R3 lead platform engineer Mike Hearn seemed to anticipate the announcement of an alliance between the EEA and Hyperledger, which he dismissed as more of "a marketing event rather than a major change to the way the platforms work."

Whatever you want to call it, in terms of strategy, a strong alliance between the EEA and Hyperledger would seem to put them on one side and R3 on the other.