The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance and Hyperledger announced Monday that the two organizations have partnered up to collaborate on open standards across the distributed ledger blockchain industry.

By formally joining each other’s organizations as associate members, both organizations will be able to share information, interconnect membership, form cross-community events and collaborate on open standards.

The EEA is the first global standards organization for Ethereum, a public blockchain focused on driving standardized blockchain standards building for enterprise networks. Hyperledger, as a project of the Linux Foundation, works to foster the development of open source software and standards for building, managing and connecting enterprise blockchain networks.

According to a statement coauthored by representatives of the two organizations, this alliance will allow Hyperledger developers to write code that conforms to the EEA specification and certify applications through EEA certification testing programs planned to launch during the second half of 2019.

“Collaborating through mutual associate membership provides more opportunities for both organizations to work more closely together,” said EEA Executive Director Ron Resnick. “In addition, Hyperledger developers who join the EEA can participate in EEA Certification to ensure solution compliance for projects related to the Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification.”

Alternatively, EEA developers will also be able to collaborate with Hyperledger on the software implementation of those standards. This would include lightweight efforts through Hyperledger Labs or proposed as top-level projects to the Technical Steering Committee.

To bolster cross-collaboration and sharing, both organizations will host meetups and events across the globe from hackathons to conventions intent on providing spaces for training, networking and building opportunities between the two implementations.

“Great open standards depend upon great open source code, so this is a natural alliance for both organizations,” said Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf. “Standards, specifications and certification all help enterprise blockchain customers commit to implementations with confidence since they have better assurances of interoperability as well as multiple vendors of choice.”

Previous to this formal partnership, the EEA and Hyperledger have worked together to promote collaborative standards. One example includes the launch of the Hyperledger Burrow project in 2017, an Apache-licensed implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecode interpreter. Earlier this year, Hyperledger Sawtooth added that EVM to its implementation, which brought smart contracts developed for the Ethereum mainnet over to Sawtooth-based networks.

“For anyone who ever put a ‘vs.’ between Ethereum and Hyperledger, this collaboration shows it’s now ‘Ethereum AND Hyperledger,’” said Behlendorf. “We expect developers building Enterprise Ethereum-related technologies to be motivated to submit projects to Hyperledger, and we hope that project maintainers will consider taking de facto interfaces that are suitable for standardization to the appropriate Special Interest Group at the EEA.”

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