Commerzbank joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) last week. The EEA is thus the third Blockchain consortium to which the German financial institution has joined.
Commerzbank is showing an uninterrupted interest in blockchain technology. This was already apparent a few years ago, when the bank began to develop on the MultiChain platform. A little later, BigChainDB joined another private blockchain platform. On June 20, Commerzbank announced in a press release that it had joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. The EEA is committed to connecting startups as well as larger ("Fortune 500") companies, academics and technology providers with Ethereum experts.
Commerzbank thus handles five different blockchain standards: In addition to the above, Hyperledger and R3 are also included. What might at first appear to be an indiscriminate one, has quite a method:
"Joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is another important step for us in diversifying our blockchain activities and testing different technology standards."
says Jörg Hessenmüller, responsible for Development and Strategy at Commerzbank, in the press release.
Not a blockchain, but many
The buzzword here is diversification - but not in the sense of a diversified investment à la "some standard will be", but under the aspect of networked blockchains.
Paul Kammerer, co-founder of the Bank's Blockchain Laboratory, said in an interview:
"We firmly believe there will not be one blockchain solution, but many - the big challenge is how they communicate with each other."
One month ago, Commerzbank and ThyssenKrupp had their first FX transaction via Blockchain. For the implementation of the foreign exchange business, the bank and companies resorted to the CORDA technology of the R3 Blockchain consortium.
It will be interesting to see what the bank's blockchain lab will do next. The growing number of employees indicates that the DLT Sandbox has proven its worth so far: within just a few years, the number of employees has risen from five to 23 - with an upward trend.