6 QUESTIONS WITH CHAALS NEVILE

April 22, 2019

6 QUESTIONS WITH CHAALS NEVILE – EEA TECHNICAL PROGRAM DIRECTOR*

What is your role as part of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) org?

I am the EEA’s Technical Program Director and my responsibility is to ensure that we develop our specifications using a modern, fair and effective process. I support the EEA Working Group’ chairs, management and our global member-base. My role draws on my experience in technical standards work and community development, which stretches back quite a few years. Since it is essential to ensure that all members are heard, we focus and respond to members’ real business needs, and, by extension, those of their customers as well. We believe it is essential to take into account the diverse perspectives and aims of our members as there is a lot to consider in building a good quality standard that will be helpful to industries that build on the blockchain.

Tell me about the EEA and its membership?

The EEA drives the development of Ethereum-based blockchains for enterprise usage, providing features beyond those on the MainNet. Also, we contribute our expertise as part of the overall community working on blockchain’s continued development.

The members of the EEA are technology vendors, solutions providers, blockchain technologists and customers from a wide range of industries – all looking to use blockchain technology. Members come from around the globe and work in markets including health, finance, legal, insurance, chemical, telecoms, and many more.

What were the biggest challenges in using this technology?

With any emerging technology, proprietary solutions appear first on the market. The same is true for blockchain. The value of an industry organization like the EEA is that our open standards-based approach eliminates vendor lock-in – customers can avoid having to stay with one particular vendor who controls both the feature set and the pricing.

To solve blockchain’s biggest challenges, the EEA takes a collaborative approach to the evolution of the EEA specification, which is free and publicly available for review at entethalliance.org.

In addition to the Technical Specification Working Group, the EEA has a dozen or so industry-specific Special Interest Groups, where members can explore use cases, available solutions, and the overall blockchain technology landscape as well as drive input to standards.

By combining broad representation from the customer space and vendor space, the EEA can match meaningful, realistic enterprise business requirements to develop an interoperable global industry specification for all. We invite all that are interested to learn more about the EEA at entethalliance.org.

What can we expect from EEA in the next 12 months?

EEA was formed in February 2017 and published its first architecture and specification in May 2018. In Oct. 2018, the EEA released the next version of the Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification, and the first public version of the EEA Off-Chain Trusted Compute Specification V0.5. EEA specifications and related materials are available for public download on the EEA website entethalliance.org.

In the next 12 months, we intend to produce two revisions of our specifications. Core work for those specification releases includes enhanced permissioning and work on enterprise-oriented consensus algorithms.

We are also ramping up our work on testing and certification programs. This work will provide a reliable method for testing and then certifying that solutions conform to the EEA specification. These programs are vital because they give customers confidence in the ecosystem and in the products they buy and choose, knowing that they are among the systems known to interoperate and conform to the EEA’s standards.

What can we expect from blockchain in the next 12 months?

We are seeing an increasing understanding of the importance of standards-based ecosystems. Standards ensure long-term confidence in the blockchain and enable organizations to start developing on the platform without being locked into a single vendor, which for many customers is a core requirement before they make a move toward deployment.

As well as the EEA work, there is important work being done on the Ethereum MainNet – major players like the Ethereum Foundation, the EthMagicians, and the EEA members are all working together to create a core that responds to a large variety of needs that businesses and other organizations can deploy with confidence.

I anticipate seeing some more diversity come into the usage of the blockchain which is good for the ecosystem. I expect to see less speculation driven by the idea of becoming overnight millionaires, and more deployments focused on solving actual enterprise problems, more efficiently, or in ways that were not feasible without blockchain technologies.

What are you most looking forward to at the show?

I always look forward to talking to people across the blockchain space, getting a sense for how well we are reflecting the needs of industry, and hearing from both those pushing the envelope as well as those who are just dipping their toes and want to know more about what the space can offer them.

Find Chaals at the Blockchain Expo:
Meetup | EEA – Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Day 1 5:00pm
Blockchain Solutions For Enterprise – Day 1: 12:20PM
Creating real-world, interoperable applications for enterprise blockchain environments worldwide – Day 1: 5:00PM

Explore more by attending the Blockchain Expo Global event @ London Olympia 25-26th April.

Blockchain Expo Europe will also take place at RAI, Amsterdam on 19-20 June 2019. Blockchain Expo North America will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley on 13-14 November 2019.