The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has added 86 new members from a diverse field of industries. On the financial applications side, it welcomes San Francisco’s Stock Exchange, the National Bank of Canada, ING, and many others, with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) standing out.
According to Wikipedia, they “settled the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States and close to $1.7 quadrillion in value worldwide, making it by far the highest financial value processor in the world.”
They are a centralized clearing house for securities such as stocks and mortgages. They basically do what the blockchain does, allowing institutions to transfer value from A to B, but in a centralized way.
That makes blockchain technology very interesting for them, with Rob Palatnick, Managing Director and Chief Technology Architect at DTCC, stating:
“DTCC has been focused on advancing DLT initiatives for the benefit of the financial services industry for the past few years. Our membership will enable us to extend our support for popular open source DLT communities, with a long term goal to establish standards and achieve interoperability across ledgers.”
The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance brings together many household brands to “evolve Ethereum so that is can serve as an enterprise-grade technology,” according to a press release, with the alliance further “investigating hybrid architectures that span both permissioned and public Ethereum networks as well as industry specific application layer working groups.”
It is unique in the public blockchain space and it revolves around ethereum because of its smart contracts functionalities which makes it possible to turn money into dynamic code that can automatically be transferred based on stated rules.
The first application of blockchain technology was mainly focused on finance with that area continuing to play a prominent role as almost all banks are looking into the technology with some launching pilots and testing based on ethereum, like the recent announcement by the Irish banks.
Its application, however, is far wider, ranging from music to games, supply chains to industrial machines, charging stations to even cars, energy, oil, and far more. The platform, therefore, has the potential of becoming the base protocol upon which everything else runs, somewhat like the internet.
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