Post-Bitcoin Technology Has Geeks, Giants, and Hackers Excited

In late February about 200 executives, coders, and developers gathered in the downtown Brooklyn office of JPMorgan Chase & Co. to hear an all-day pitch for a new industry group called the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Ethereum? It’s the ghostly sounding name for a so-called blockchain technology similar to the one that made the digital currency bitcoin possible. Its inventor, Vitalik Buterin, released his software to the world in 2015, not long after dropping out of the University of Waterloo, in Canada. Less than two years later, JPMorgan, BP, Microsoft, International Business Machines, and ING are among the companies in the group experimenting with it.

Buterin didn’t attend the EEA meeting, but he had a video message to deliver. Except the EEA couldn’t get the video to play, because the computer hosting it crashed. As the crowd began to stir, a frozen frame of Buterin’s face came on-screen, then he disappeared. After the tech crew scrambled for 30 minutes, they finally got it to work.