And It's Got a Roadmap to Prove It

Apart from a steady stream of new members, there has been a lull of live projects, one that has led some to theorize the consortium might not deliver on standards for enterprise use of the world's second-largest blockchain.

Case in point, the consortium itself has swelled to more than 500 firms - ranging from global banks such as BBVA, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan to blockchain startups and traditional tech providers like Microsoft.

From the bottom up, there's the base-level peer-to-peer network protocol layer, and on top of that is the core blockchain layer, which organizes consensus, transaction execution and data storage.

At a recent talk at London's Blockchain Expo, EEA founding board member Jeremy Millar said.

It's likely some EEA features will be taken back into the code for the public ethereum blockchain in the form of ethereum improvement proposals.

Still, a key challenge for EEA is the fact that ethereum was designed for public use, and so fully broadcasts transactions to all nodes in the blockchain.

On the subject of privacy, JPMorgan Chase's Quorum, which was last year described as the jewel in the EEA crown, blazed something of a trail by incorporating zero-knowledge proofs into its banking blockchain design.

Now the word on the street is that Quorum may be spun out of JPM, and its blockchain lead Amber Baldet has since left the bank to join a yet-to-named startup.

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