This New Ethereum Software Client Is Built With Enterprises in Mind

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Pantheon is a suite of ethereum-based services built by PegaSys, a 50-strong engineering team at the ethereum design studio ConsenSys.

Changing to the Apache 2.0 license allows businesses to own and monetize the intellectual property they create when building on top of ethereum.

There wasn't really a client or protocol that was building for both the needs of the ethereum public chain community and also focusing on the standards being pushed by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Released today at Devcon, the annual gathering of ethereum devs, Pantheon will begin by plugging into standard ethereum application programming interfaces and ethereum virtual machine calls, Khan said.

Stepping back, there have been attempts in the past to bring ethereum under the Apache license, such as abortive efforts coordinated by the ethereum and Hyperledger communities back at beginning of 2017 to incorporate the C++ ethereum client under more permissive licensing.

A version of ethereum did later make it into Hyperledger and Apache in the form of the open source Burrow blockchain, contributed by distributed ledger technology builder Monax.

More recently, the ethereum and Hyperledger connection has been strengthened by advancements with the implementation known as Sawtooth and also recent announcements about the Hyperleder Foundation and EEA working together.

Khan pointed out that current licensing of ethereum has not stopped people from building tools and even going towards production, as demonstrated by many EEA members.

Khan said establishing an ethereum client that develops its enterprise-focused features in lock-step with the evolution of the public ethereum blockchain looks towards a grand interoperability prize in the future.

As Peter Szilagyi of the Ethereum Foundation rather poetically pointed out, there's a "Graveyard" of ethereum clients that are no longer maintained because of the amount of work involved and the blockchain network's constant evolution.