Polygon, Ethena, and Nethermind Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance as “Institutional Ethereum” Accelerates
picture: Enterprise Ethereum Alliance press release
NEW YORK — Feb. 11, 2026 — The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced that Polygon Labs, Ethena, and Nethermind have joined the organization, framing the move as a sign that Ethereum’s “institutional stack” is consolidating across three key layers: payments rails, DeFi-native financial primitives, and protocol engineering.
The EEA positioned itself as a neutral coordination layer where enterprises, infrastructure providers, and protocol teams can align on how Ethereum is used in regulated, large-scale environments—supported by governance protections such as IP, NDA, and antitrust frameworks.
Polygon: payments rails and “Open Money Stack” positioning
In the announcement, Polygon Labs is cast as the payments and settlement layer. The release points to Polygon Labs’ recently announced definitive agreements to acquire Coinme and Sequence for more than $250 million, describing the goal as expanding into regulated stablecoin payments and onchain financial services.
Polygon also highlighted volume claims tied to stablecoin usage, saying Polygon processed more than $7 billion in stablecoin payments in a single month and that Polygon Chain processed more than $7 billion in peer-to-peer stablecoin volume in November 2025, while noting institutional deployments including BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
Nethermind: execution-layer engineering and security for “production Ethereum”
Nethermind is framed as the “keep it running safely” part of the stack. The release describes Nethermind as a protocol engineering and research team building execution-layer infrastructure and security tooling used to run Ethereum in production, with a focus on institutional requirements such as performance under load, upgrade readiness, and verifiable security.
The EEA said Nethermind will contribute implementation depth to technical working groups, translating enterprise requirements into testable deployments.
Ethena: DeFi-native dollar infrastructure meets institutional workflows
Ethena’s entry is pitched as the DeFi financial-primitive layer. The release notes that USDe reached $10 billion in total value locked in 500 days, describing it as the fastest digital dollar asset to hit that milestone and positioning it as an alternative to fiat-backed stablecoins for use cases including treasury management and rewards strategies.
Ethena said joining the EEA supports engagement with institutional stakeholders exploring how DeFi-native instruments fit into regulated workflows.
Industry takeaway: why this matters for crypto (and for “institutional Ethereum”)
This is less about memberships and more about standardizing the institutional Ethereum playbook:
- Payments + primitives + protocol engineering are converging into one stack. Institutions don’t adopt “a chain” — they adopt a full system: settlement rails, compliant financial products, and production-grade client/security tooling.
- Coordination is becoming a competitive advantage. If enterprises want regulated, large-scale Ethereum usage, they’ll favor ecosystems where requirements can be translated into shared standards and deployable implementations.
- The next phase is less hype, more plumbing. Stablecoin volume claims, execution-layer reliability, and DeFi-native dollar products are all “infrastructure narratives” — the kind that tends to matter more as institutions move from pilots to production.
Bottom line: the EEA is selling itself as the table where Ethereum’s institutional-grade components get stitched together—while Polygon, Nethermind, and Ethena are positioning their pieces as core building blocks of that emerging stack.