Armed with sky-high expectations and seemingly boundless enthusiasm for how tech could reinvent industry in the digital age, the "blockchain" industry has been overwhelmed with blockchains.
Not only are there multiple open public blockchain projects, but legacy institutions and corporates are building exclusive permissioned blockchains. So far this year, there have been specialty blockchains created for everything from credit default swaps to managing global supply chains .
It’s unclear how these blockchains will need to interact with each other in the future to prove its benefits. But there’s consensus that some standards are needed to promote competition while eliminating redundancies.
Entering into this wider discussion is the W3C , the international standards body for web development that has taken an interest in web payments.
Last week, the W3C held its first blockchain workshop , an event that showcased how many areas of the industry are ripe for standardization as well as how much work needs to be done to bring together various stakeholders working on the technology.
Among the participants, few were apprehensive about standardization, thinking the industry was too young and standards could impede progress made through experimentation. The majority, however, see this discussion as one that’s driven by business need.
Christopher Allen, principal architect at blockchain tech company Blockstream, told CoinDesk: "In order to move forward and work with other organizations we can’t all have different data formats and APIs. No one will buy into that if we do it that way." Data first
Which is why there’s plenty of talk about interoperability.Most participants were interested in developing standard APIs and primitive data formats (those provided by the programming language) to allow both new and legacy applications to have consistent approaches to communicating with blockchains.First objectives in this area included key management and payment protocols, and most are layers above blockchain that use […]
