The EEA TestNet will serve as a pre-certification sandbox, where streams of ethereum can be regulated according to precise specifications set out previously by the EEA, which will make them interoperable with each other.

There are now numbers of companies operating on enterprise versions of ethereum, plus a solely new group of industry players entering the fold through Hyperledger’s ethereum-based member Besu, making standardization a preference.

As it stands, ethereum-based consumers and rules are frequently inadequate to talk to each other. For instance, Quorum, the privacy-centric variant of ethereum strengthened by mega-bank JPMorgan, can’t work with Hyperledger Besu, which is intended to work smoothly across the public ethereum mainnet and private deployments.

“Early on in technology families, people do often make assumptions of interoperability. But when you put these pieces together in an app, they don’t work,” stated Paul DiMarzio, director of community for the EEA.

The launch of the testing ground, generated by the DLT testing platform Whiteblock Genesis, makes the EEA standards program into its “middle stage,” stated DiMarzio.

“We are providing a place where clients can start to get their feet wet in a testing environment and then, towards the end of the year, will provide the actual ability to certify against those specifications. Then we can stamp things as being EEA certified and branded and have that guarantee of interoperability as opposed to an assumption,” he said.

Zak Cole, CEO of Whiteblock, takes up a position as chair of the EEA Testing and Certification Working Group. Cole said the TestNet would exist considerably as businesses proceed to join the ethereum community.

“Even if we have some tech specs finalized, people are going to want to be able to experiment within a low-risk environment,” he said.

There has been some bit of competition between JPMorgan’s Quorum and Hyperledger Besu, which was developed by engineers at Pegasys, one of the significant parts in the ConsenSys wheel of ethereum-based startups.

The current disconnect among Quorum and Besu turns on a definite difference in the implementation of the IBFT (Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus algorithm, which DiMarzio stated the new test conditions could help “iron out.”

“Some scenarios include public transactions, private transactions, permissions, block validation, and the IBFT consensus mechanism,” stated Dan Heyman, head of Pegasys, in a statement about proposed test scenarios for Besu. “An EEA certification program is being talked about for potentially the end of 2020.”

JPMorgan declined to comment.

DiMarzio stated EEA needs to regulate its testing program with the Ethereum Foundation, which is managing the rollout of the Ethereum 2.0 public blockchain. Still, the majority of the EEA’s concentration is not directly concerned with the complicated switch to a proof of stake (PoS) system of block-creation.

“The EEA TestNet is intended for members to run applications that follow current EEA specifications. PoW and PoS are consensus algorithms, and the current EEA client spec does not dictate what specific consensus algorithm must be used. A shift in base protocols from PoW to PoS will, of course, be evaluated by the working groups to determine if the specs (and TestNet) should be changed,” he said.

Most private clients presently replace different consensus algorithms, like Raft, IBFT, and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET).

“The EEA working groups are in particular looking at Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithms, primarily those related to IBFT, for potential future adds to the spec,” said DiMarzio.