Microsoft, Intel, JP Morgan, Reuters, UBS, and others form the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to integrate Ethereum blockchain into enterprise products
Tuesday, February 28, 2017 Robert Hackett / Fortune : Big Business Giants From Microsoft to J.P. Morgan Are Getting Behind Ethereum Anna Irrera / Reuters : JPMorgan, Microsoft, BP, UBS, Credit Suisse, Intel, and more are forming a new blockchain alliance Tweets: ConsenSys / @consensysllc : “In every industry we come across, #Ethereum is usually the first platform people go to” -Marley Gray, @Microsoft http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance lands in an already crowded field of corporate blockchain consortia: nine banks including Goldman Sachs and Barclays had earlier lined up behind R3's markets framework, and IBM and JPMorgan backed the Linux Foundation's Open Ledger Project. What distinguishes this group is its anchor platform — instead of building a private ledger from scratch, Microsoft, Intel, JPMorgan, UBS, BP, and Credit Suisse are standardizing on the public Ethereum codebase.
The alliance's formation also formalizes a split in the enterprise camp between permissioned-ledger projects and Ethereum-based ones, with Microsoft's Marley Gray positioning Ethereum as the default first stop across industries. How that split resolves shapes everything downstream, from member rosters to tooling.
First-order effects
- The founding members get a shared standards body for putting Ethereum into enterprise products, while the Open Ledger Project and R3 suddenly face a rival consortium pitching the same banks on a different ledger stack.
Second-order effects
- Membership pressure follows: the alliance's roster expands within months to Mastercard, Cisco, Scotiabank, and even the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (new members join), turning consortium affiliation itself into a competitive signal among large enterprises.
- Rather than a winner-take-all standards war, the two camps converge — the EEA and the Hyperledger Project agree to collaborate on cross-ledger interoperability (2018 collaboration), forcing vendors to support both stacks.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to enterprise blockchain adoption running through vendor-neutral consortia rather than any single company's platform, with the alliance itself becoming durable infrastructure — by 2019 it issues trusted reward tokens backed by Microsoft and Intel to coordinate member consortiums (reward token system).
- Consortium membership converts into capital relationships: ConsenSys, the Ethereum infrastructure firm quoted at the alliance's founding, later raises $65M from JPMorgan, Mastercard, and UBS ($65M raise) — the same institutions funding the ecosystem they helped standardize.
The trend: Enterprise blockchain is consolidating around neutral industry consortia built on shared open ledgers, with Ethereum and permissioned projects competing for members before converging on interoperability.