Dive Brief:

• Two of the largest blockchain organizations in the world have joined forces to facilitate the creation of blockchain-based enterprise tools, according to a press release.
• The two groups are The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a global standards organization driving the adoption of Enterprise Ethereum, and Hyperledger, an open source blockchain initiative designed to help industries build and adopt tools utilizing blockchain.
• "Great open standards depend upon great open source code, so this is a natural alliance for both organizations," said Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf in a statement. "Standards, specifications and certification all help enterprise blockchain customers commit to implementations with confidence since they have better assurances of interoperability as well as multiple vendors of choice."

Dive Insight:

Blockchain technology has plenty of applications within organizations, but its ability to transform the supply chain through increased efficiency and tracking capabilities would come from cooperation between disparate players. In order to do this on a large scale, developers need to conform to common standards to ensure interoperability between systems.

The EEA delivers standards-based specifications to do just that with members like JP Morgan Chase, Intel and Accenture.

Hyperledger's members have access to "enterprise-grade, open-source distributed ledger frameworks and code bases" and include players from finance, banking, internet of things (IoT), supply chains and manufacturing. Existing members include Accenture, Airbus, Daimler, FedEx, Honeywell International, IBM and SAP.

The EEA-Hyperledger partnership will offer members a wider array of resources to use in developing blockchain-based tools and greater assurance that any tools they create will be compatible with other software they may need to interact with down the line — clearing the way for more investment in blockchain-based tools.

Until this partnership, the two organizations were seen as somewhat in competition, encouraging businesses to choose one or the other. (Microsoft was with EEA and IBM was with Hyperledger, for example)

"For anyone who ever put a 'vs.' between Ethereum and Hyperledger, this collaboration shows it’s now 'Ethereum AND Hyperledger,'" said Behlendorf. "We expect developers building enterprise Ethereum-related technologies to be motivated to submit projects to Hyperledger, and we hope that project maintainers will consider taking de-facto interfaces that are suitable for standardization to the appropriate Special Interest Group at the EEA."