As the price of Bitcoin sky rockets, credit unions are plunging deeper into the world of crypto-currencies, with the belief that investing in the block chain technology may pay off in the long run.

The National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions announced yesterday that it is partnering with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, becoming the first nonprofit financial services trade association to join the alliance. The NAFCU also joined Hyperledger, an open-source, global collaboration effort to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies hosted by The Linux Foundation, in October.

“NAFCU is pleased to be invited to join Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and we look forward to contributing to one of the world’s leading blockchain technology initiatives,” NAFCU President and CEO Dan Berger said in a statement. “With this new partnership, NAFCU hopes to bring critical knowledge of blockchain technology to the credit union industry and create an innovative environment where NAFCU members can inform technology firms of what credit unions need most.”

Established in February, EEA’s members include more than 300 organizations in technology, financial services, government, healthcare, energy, pharmaceuticals and a number of fast-growing Ethereum startups. It is an industry-supported, not-for-profit created to build, promote and broadly back Ethereum-based technology best practices, open standards and open-source reference architectures.

The organization provides information in a range of areas beneficial to credit unions including privacy, confidentiality, scalability and security.

Ethereum is an open software platform based on blockchain technology that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications. The main difference Ethereum has from Bitcoin is that it is viewed as more than just a currency.

Since 2016, credit unions have been getting more and more involved with blockchain.

More than 50 credit unions and credit union advocacy groups across the country have joined the CU Ledger project, which is investigating the viability of a private, permissioned distributed ledger that can be used by credit unions.