The newly formed Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has published a Vision Paper outlining “a vision for users and stakeholders to propose, implement, and integrate advances to the Ethereum protocol with support for Enterprise Ethereum protocols.” In this paper, the EEA discusses many topics related to Pluggable Consensus, governance, interoperability, Ethereum protocol updates, secure code execution, storage and performance optimization.This Vision Paper was released in conjunction with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance launch event which formalized 30 organizations coming together to focus on enterprise use cases of Ethereum.The alliance includes large established organizations like Microsoft, J.P.Morgan, Intel, Thomson Reuters and blockchain startups like BlockApps, String Labs and ConsenSys.In the short term, the EEA has identified five goals for 2017, including: Consensus is the act of nodes, within a blockchain, agreeing on the state of transactions and is predicated upon an algorithm that participating nodes agree.

Since current Ethereum implementations are not modular, when organizations need to add additional features to consensus algorithms, for example privacy, they may end up forking the Ethereum implementation.The problem with forking is that these investments are now difficult to share and create fragmentation.In order to address interoperability needs, the EEA is looking to provide modular based consensus algorithms.The EEA Vision Paper describes why Pluggable Consensus is important: A common, modularized implementation will provide a code base for developing the Enterprise Ethereum specification and also experimenting with consortia consensus algorithms.Pluggable consensus needs a modularized client with a clean interface for networking and between the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the consensus algorithm - it is really these interfaces that make the consensus layer pluggable.One consideration the EEA is allowing for, with a modular approach, is they are: not being prescriptive as to the specifics of the algorithm, but rather should enable various algorithms to be used dependent on the use case.

Version 1 Enterprise Ethereum Specification A goal of the EEA is not solely to develop an implementation, but rather to publish a specification in an attempt to: accelerate ecosystem development by increasing the availability of APIs for integration with development, devops and management tools as well as legacy system integration.armory bitcoin safeBy providing a specification, vendors can provide their own implementations, but because there are interoperability points, through interfaces, organizations can focus on their specific requirements.litecoin buying and sellingCompatibility and interoperability is not only a goal with Enterprise Ethereum, but also with public Ethereum.bitcoin hvThe alliance is currently targeting being a US-based not-for-profit foundation.bitcoin italia legale

The alliance is looking for a lead executive and volunteer Chair, in addition to an Executive Director, to take on the day-to-day management functions.The EEA has stated its core will be based upon members and member participation with special interest groups focused on writing prototypes, architectures, roadmaps and industry groups.bitcoin philanthropyThese interest groups will be grounded in four guiding principles: While cross blockchain protocol interoperability may take some time to be realized, the EEA is building a set of requirements focused on interoperability including: In order to achieve interoperability, the EEA is designing using: abstraction and modularity, with clear interfaces and APIs.bitcoin mining hardware gh/sThe EEA also anticipates that interfaces will be difficult to change once published, and as a result sees this interoperability work to be: critical, even at these early stages.bitcoin gh/s wiki

The current Ethereum protocol is dependent upon a node choosing the next block for the longest-chain based upon a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm which is computationally expensive.The downside to this approach is that there is a limitation of a blockchain being able to commit a new block around every 10 seconds.bitcoin pool difficultyAs Ethereum make more inroads into the enterprise, the ability to scale services to millions of users creates challenges for the existing protocol.bitcoin node counterThe EEA is looking for alternatives to PoW that improve scalability and reduce computational costs.There are many approaches being evaluated which may form the future of Ethereum block consensus protocols, including: Other opportunities exist in the network protocol layer of Ethereum where “atomic broadcasts of a total order of state sequences amongst a network of nodes that may experience byzantine failures” are required.

There are several proposals of network consensus protocols for Ethereum being considered, including: There are also some approaches that combine both block and network consensus protocols, including: In addition to changes to block and network consensus protocols, other scalability approaches like sharding, parallelization and state channels are also being explored.Enterprise Ethereum brings organizations together through Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).One emerging challenge is in the area of governance.For example, what happens when a shared program, or contract, needs to be versioned and updated?The EEA is looking to: explore the development of contract interfaces and classes for shared administration, in addition to design patterns applicable to the updating of operational code on already deployed systems.Trusted Computing and Oracles/Data Feeds There are a few different approaches to secure trusted code that needs to be executed.One such way is through the use of mainstream hardware.

An example of this is “Intel SGX which provides enclaves, memory-encrypted on-silicon circuits which can only run signed, attested code, in a way such that other processes cannot access it.” Another way to approach this problem is to leverage services like Microsoft Azure’s Cryptlets which is part of its Project Bletchley initiative and focuses on providing secure blockchain middleware services.Secure locations to run trusted code is important when trying to include data feeds into distributed applications, or smart contracts.The Ethereum Enterprise initiative is trying to address secure code execution by: focusing on protocol level implementations at the onset, with time, efforts to establish meaningful design patterns around oracle data (and perhaps more importantly, how to apply penalties for bad actors publishing malicious data) are expected to emerge from members of the Foundation.Many decentralized applications have requirements to store data such as documents and media.