The Weekend Read: March 5

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance formally kicked off earlier this week with an all day meet up in JP Morgan’s Brooklyn offices. The group consists of Ethereum-focused startups and large companies, with a focus on developing standards for private Ethereum deployments. The reaction by the press was curious, as many picked up a theme of Microsoft and IBM waging a proxy war via EEA (Microsoft) and the Hyperledger project (IBM). For example, American Banker noted “the IBM-led Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project” and their use of “a mainframe in a cloud” vs Microsoft as “more focused on openness — letting organizations choose the combinations of technology that work best for them.” Coindesk followed up with an article on the decentralized nature of the new group:

Still, while the board is also designed to give members a sense of accountability, more experimental governance models are also being considered. “Everything starts as an idea, with one person,” said Lubin. “That happened. But Ethereum is moving towards decentralization.”

The press loves a simple narrative (see below for a fine example), but both groups are very diverse and seek to move the whole industry forward, as we ALL have a lot of work to do to make this technology real for business users. One theme that did persist at Tuesday’s EEA launch was the desire to keep aligned, and in some minds perhaps eventually merged, with the public Ethereum chain (not to be confused with Ethereum Classic, or Ethereum Classic Classic!). This and Bitcoin’s recent price surge are most likely what is behind the recent ramp up in the price of ether. For an older, somewhat related article on public Ethereum, I recommend this Aeon article.

Et Tu, Blockchain?

The only good thing to come out of the R3 non-story was this new Tim Swanson meme...
The only good thing to come out of the R3 non-story was this new Tim Swanson meme…

Over the last two weeks, a blockchain butterfly flapped its wings, and the next thing we knew, R3 was caught in the oddest of fake-news hurricanes. In short: a tweeted pic from a Corda meetup was coupled with the quote “GAME OVER” (perhaps an early tribute to the great Bill Paxton?) and the next thing we knew, there were all sorts of nonsense articles and blog posts. For a run down, you can read Chris Skinner’s take (and yes, his is an intentional fake news headline…) and this Bank Innovation piece (Dave Birch: I would love to meet your tailor). In shorter: it was all complete BS. Which was disappointing, but not surprising. I just finished the Michael Lewis book The Undoing Project and the one thing the book taught me was that we are all “confirmation bias” machines. Or as The New Yorker put it: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

As David Rutter pointed out in his blog post last week:

Humans are creatures of habit. As time went on, the term blockchain came to be associated with any type of distributed ledger, even as the technology matured and evolved to meet the needs of different groups of users. This isn’t an issue unique to our space. The marketing team at Canon must have spent countless hours working out how to stop people referring to all copy machines as Xeroxs.

We can see this in two other thoughtful articles that were recently published. Our very own Antony Lewis has a great take on Distributed Ledger Technology for post trade published in Tabb Group…yet the title chosen by the editors was “Applying Blockchain to Post-Trade Derivatives Processing.” Another from CFO magazine includes yours truly and does a great job in explaining why CFOs should pay attention to distributed ledger technology…which they term “Betting on Blockchain.”

Lost in the noise was the release of an 80 page report by the Aite Group. This Coindesk review of the report gives a flavor of the market landscape that Aite explored, including this key quote:

“A growing trend, adopted by five chaintech platforms and spearheaded by R3,” writes Paz, “calls for consensus taking place at the transaction level, requiring the consent of at least two counterparty nodes.”

Another bit lost was our new intro video to Corda, which declares in very plain language what Corda is (and isn’t):

But don’t just trust our word on it. Sign up for Corda training or sign up to our Slack, and see (and debate) for yourself!

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