Not everyone wants to copy the world’s most successful blockchain. While bitcoin’s public-facing, immutable ledger has proven resilient to attacks (and a mostly reliable way to transact peer-to-peer), businesses are still looking for something else to meet their volume and privacy requirements. Yet, this search for alternatives has prompted problems of its own. In an effort to build products that meet diverse demands, using varied and often incompatible technologies, consortia have formed to help standardize the way financial institutions and enterprises build with blockchain. At the core of the effort is a conflict over whether numerous blockchains with different technological features might replicate the complexity and inefficiencies of the current system, or otherwise slow down innovation. Working behind the scenes in this delicate balancing act are multiple standards-making bodies around the world, as well as startups and corporations. However, it remains to be seen if these efforts will yield the desired results. Ajit Tripathi, a director of financial services at PwC in London, explained that there’s potentially more at stake in the act of making a standard than just streamlining workflows. Tripathi told CoinDesk: "In any consortium, participants will always push for the standards that benefit them the most. If you push for a standard where your integration costs are lower than others, you benefit. Even if you’re in a consortium where you’re supposed to cooperate, there is an element of competition." In the act Indeed, Tripathi noted that there’s even some competition between the standards bodies themselves. Among the efforts PwC has participated in include the European standards body ESMA’s consultation on the applications of DLT; the World Wide Web Consortium ‘s workshops on blockchain and distributed ledgers; and the US-based Object Management Group’s (OMG) Finance Domain Task Force , which is exploring blockchain in the financial sector. […]
