Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Joined by 34 More Organizations, Including Mastercard and Cisco

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the world’s largest open-source Blockchain initiative, has recently added 34 new members expanding to a total of 150 organizations. 

Mastercard and Cisco Systems 

The EEA is a non-profit consortium that is focused the developments of Ether or in the broader sense, the whole Ethereum Blockchain. Among their 34 new members are Mastercard and Cisco as well as the Scotiabank and Government of Pradesh. While Cisco is clearly on the list of the new members in the press release, the absence of Mastercard's name has brought confusion to the Ether community in Reddit. But actually, the true reason behind this is because Mastercard refused to be included in the press release document. 

Andrew Keys of ConsenSys explains:

“Mastercard is indeed a new member of EEA. They asked not to be in the press release document but approved being on the EEA official website. They may be doing their own communications on this.”

Aside from those banks and financial institutions, there are also members of EEA that come from different fields and business sectors. They have members representing various industries including technology, government, healthcare, marketing, insurance, energy and even some of the fastest-growing Ethereum start-ups. 

The goals of EEA

The consortium was formed just this year in the late February. It was initiated by a group of Ether innovators, financial institutions and Blockchain start-ups. Two of the most prominent founding members of EEA are Intel and JP Morgan Chase. 

EEA was established "to build, promote, and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, open standards and open source reference architectures."

In other words, they aim to streamline the Blockchain technology to be suitable for enterprise settings.

Furthermore, EEA also puts privacy, scalability, confidentiality and security as their priority - a much-needed alliance considering all the security and price volatility issues Ethereum has been experiencing recently.