EEA Monthly Spotlight: An Incredible Kickoff to 2026

Four new members, a Privacy Working Group with industry leaders, the launch of our institutional event series in NYC and upcoming events!

Author

Radha Mathur
March 12, 2026

After a strong close to 2025, we hit the ground running. The first two months of 2026 brought new members into the fold, a major new working group, and the launch of something we've been building toward for a while: a recurring institutional event series designed for the people actually making decisions about Ethereum in their organizations.

Here's what shaped the start of the year.

Table of Contents

✨ New Members Spotlight

Four organizations joined the EEA membership in the opening weeks of 2026, each bringing distinct capabilities that strengthen the enterprise Ethereum stack.

Polygon deepens our L2 and scaling coverage, with production infrastructure already serving major institutions. Ethena brings expertise in synthetic dollar infrastructure and onchain yield, relevant as more treasuries explore DeFi-native strategies. Nethermind, one of the most respected Ethereum client teams, adds deep protocol-level engineering and research to the community. 

→ Read the full release on what these big additions mean for our member ecosystem.

And to celebrate our latest - Tally.xyz! They provide onchain infrastructure for the full token lifecycle, from launch and price discovery to governance, staking, and rewards distribution, with tooling built for U.S. regulatory compliance. They bring governance tooling and infrastructure that's increasingly relevant as enterprises explore onchain decision-making.

Together, they reflect the broadening of what "enterprise Ethereum" means, from infrastructure and DeFi to governance and protocol engineering.

🚀 EEA Privacy Working Group Launch

Privacy has consistently been the number one blocker cited by enterprises evaluating Ethereum for production deployment. This year, we’re doing something about it.

The EEA Privacy Working Group brings together eight initial contributors: Applied Blockchain (Silent Data), Consensys (Linea), COTI, EY (Nightfall), Polygon, Kaleido (Paladin), ZKsync, and Ethereum Foundation to map the current landscape of enterprise-relevant privacy solutions across Ethereum and L2 networks.

The group is focused on practical guidance: helping institutions understand how zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, multi-party computation, and garbled circuits address real operational, regulatory, and business requirements.

A forthcoming publication will provide a structured overview of these approaches and implementation considerations for financial institutions and enterprises evaluating Ethereum-based solutions.

This is the EEA doing what it does best - convening the right people to create shared language and frameworks that help enterprises move from evaluation to deployment with confidence.

🗽 EEA Institutional Ethereum Breakfast

February 27 · Microsoft Garage, New York City

We launched something new this month: a recurring, invite-only breakfast series for institutions building on Ethereum. A room full of people making decisions about institutional Ethereum adoption, over breakfast!

L to R: Dennis O’Connell and Redwan Meslem

The first edition brought leaders from financial institutions, asset managers, custodians, and infrastructure providers to Microsoft Garage in NYC.

Dennis O’Connell, President of ERC-3643 and Strategic Advisor to DTCC, kicked off the conversation with an outlook on the institutional tokenization market, and what changes now.

We walked through three distinct paths emerging in the market: pure token/IOU models (Ondo, Coinbase), direct share issuance via digital transfer agents (Securitize, SuperState), and full institutional tokenization using standards like ERC-3643, which is now seeing adoption from the likes of DTCC, BNP Paribas, and others across 23 jurisdictions.

The conversation also covered how the ERC-3643 standard continues to evolve as a living standard across identity, privacy, data integration, and corporate actions, and why regulatory recognition of Ethereum-native standards is proving critical as institutions move from pilots to production on public chains.

We also covered:

  • New EEA members: Ethena, Nethermind, and Polygon shared what brought them in and what they're building

  • Privacy Working Group update: an early look at the initiative and what it means for institutional privacy on Ethereum

This is the first in a recurring series. Each session brings speakers from our membership and the broader ecosystem to share what's actually moving: regulation, infrastructure, live deployments.

If you'd like to attend a future edition, please subscribe to our Luma.

🔜 Up Next: Meet The EEA and Our Members

🌉 Ethereum Unblock SF

March 10-12 · Frontier Tower, San Francisco

This week, EEA Executive Director Redwan Meslem is at Ethereum Unblock, a three-day design sprint hosted by the Ethereum Foundation's Use Case Lab. Engineers, designers, and founders come together to build onchain solutions across marketplaces & commerce, automated organizations, and autonomous physical systems.

Day one kicks off with workshops on IDEO-style design thinking and AI workflows, followed by user research, iteration, and a demo day to close it out.

If you're in SF, please stop by and say hello!

🇫🇷 EthCC Cannes and Vault Summit: Member Discount

EthCC is back this spring in Cannes, from March 30th to April 2nd, and our subscribers get 10% off tickets for the full conference with code ETHCCEEA2026 at checkout!

→ Grab your tickets at https://ethcc.io/

We're planning to be on the ground at EthCC as well. More details on what we have in store coming soon, so mark your calendars and follow us on our Luma for updates.

If you're planning to attend, interested in co-hosting an event with us, or exploring sponsorship and visibility opportunities as part of the EEA ecosystem, respond to this email or reach out to Radha at [email protected].

🎙️ Stable Summit IV: Cannes

If you’re going to Cannes, you don’t want to miss Redwan moderating a panel at Stable Summit IV on distribution and interoperability across exchanges, payment providers, and banks.

Tickets are available for a limited time → https://cannes.stablesummit.xyz/

📣 EEA Member support: Lido Shortlisted for Hedgeweek Awards

Lido has been shortlisted for two Hedgeweek Awards, after playing a central role in Ethereum’s staking economy, including enabling institutional products such as WisdomTree’s fully-staked Ether ETP backed by Lido’s stETH.

Here’s how to vote:

  1. Log in at the link below

  2. Search for "Lido"

  3. Add your name and company in the comment section

  4. Submit your vote

We're a little over two months into 2026 and the momentum has truly been insane: new members, new working groups, new high signal events. We're building the infrastructure for enterprise Ethereum adoption not just in code, but in community, shared language, and the rooms where decisions get made.

And a lot more going on behind the scenes that we can’t wait to share with you all. 

Keen on shaping Ethereum’s institutional future?

→ Become a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and join the Ethereum Foundation, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Consensys, Chainlink, EY, Nethermind, The Graph, Lido, Ethena, Linea, Polygon, ZKsync and many more. Engage with leaders across the Ethereum enterprise ecosystem through working groups, collaborations, and events in New York and around the world.

—The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance