Ethereum Consortium Collaborates With Major Firms To Launch The Token Taxonomy Initiative

By Rishma Banerjee

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced via press release on April 17th,  the launch of a new project to help businesses design and create specific crypto tokens for their particular needs. The initiative will seek to define tokens in non-technical and cross-industry terms in a bid to drive enterprise token adoption at scale.

The EEA describes itself as, “a member-driven standards organization whose charter is to develop open, blockchain specifications that drive harmonization and interoperability.” It stressed that it is merely the host for the so-called “Token Taxonomy Initiative,” an entirely technology-neutral project which crosses ethereum, Hyperledger, R3’s Corda and Digital Asset’s DAML.

The members of the initiative reportedly include global consulting firm Accenture, major banks Santander and JPMorgan Chase, blockchain incubator ConsenSys, Big Four auditor EY, tech giants like Intel, Microsoft and IBM, blockchain consortium R3, international think-tank The Blockchain Research Institute, blockchain r&d firm Clearmatics and others.

Ron Resnick, director of EEA, vouched for the use of tokens  “to serve as, or provide access to, a set of goods, financial assets, securities, services, value or content” within enterprise-grade blockchain applications. “We are doing this for the greater common good. Standardizing tokens across all networks could hold the key to one of the greatest economic opportunities in modern history,” he added.

The project will aim to establish technical standards that can counter fragmentation between multiple blockchain protocols and ensure interoperability between platforms and use cases — whether the tokens serve currency-like purposes or represent unique assets.

The initiative will include a  Token Taxonomy Framework as well as an educational initiative, which will be run through structured Token Definition Workshops.

We’ll do some workshops…to validate and make sure we have the base definition of a non-fungable token,” said Marley Gray, Microsoft’s principal architect for Azure blockchain engineering and a member of the EEA’s Board of Directors.

“As we go through workshops, we will probably find we should add this attribute or this clarification or this example that helps someone understand it.”

The EEA — which currently includes 500 members — is engaged in ongoing token standards work, which began with a focus on Ethereum (ETH) specifications.

The organization extended its global outreach by opening a regional office in China this February. That same month, the EEA announced it would be launching a so-called “token task force,” to be focused on ETH-derived fungible ERC-20 and non-fungible ERC-721 tokens.