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Global Standards Mapping Initiative: An overview of blockchain technical standards WHITE PAPER OCTOBER 2020Contents Preface 1 Initial analysis 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Motivation and scope 1.3 Methodology 2 Context 2.1 The evolving role of standards 2.2 The evolving development of standards 2.3 A closer look: blockchain standards 2.4 Beyond standards: industry norms 3 Key findings 3.1 Terminology 3.2 Volume of activity 3.3 Scope of blockchain standards 3.4 Overlap 3.5 Gaps and divergence 3.6 Dissemination/implementation 3.7 Geographic representation 3.8 Expertise and consumer representation 3.9 Intellectual property 4 Research summary 5 Key recommendations 5.1 For standard-setting entities 5.2 For entities adopting technical standards Contributors Endnotes 3 4 4 4 5 6 7 7 7 9 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 15 15 15 16 20 20 21 23 25 Cover: Getty Images/AF-studio Inside: Unsplash/Yann Allegre 2020 World Economic Forum. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system. Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 2As blockchain technology continues its evolution, calls for clarity surrounding technical, regulatory and governance models have grown louder. Decisions on these foundational elements will shape the trajectory and potential of the technology. However, there has been little work to catalogue and evaluate the current bedrock upon which the ecosystem can build, despite the increased activity in each of these arenas. As actors across the world construct innovative solutions to address societys toughest challenges, a baseline is needed to facilitate impactful and responsible innovation. Cataloguing the status of dozens of standard- setting entities and consortia plus regulations across 129 countries, the Global Standards Mapping Initiative (GSMI) represents an unprecedented effort to map and analyse the current landscape. It is divided into two distinct components: 1. Technical standards 2. Legislation and guidance released by sovereign and international bodies and industry body best practices and standards (including an overview of industry groups and consortia) The work was a joint effort between the World Economic Forum and the Global Blockchain Business Council, with significant contributions from the MIT Media Lab, ING, Accenture, SDX and the Milken Institute. This cross-organizational effort was a truly global collaboration, as well as an alignment of previously disparate initiatives. We hope this will serve as a model for future ecosystem-wide efforts of a similar nature. These reports are intended to serve as a comprehensive resource for the blockchain community and beyond to assess the current landscape and evaluate where there may be gaps, overlaps, inconsistencies and conflicts. Preface Global Standards Mapping Initiative: An overview of blockchain technical standards October 2020 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 3Introduction Motivation and scope Initial analysis Over the past few years, blockchain has gone through significant periods of hype and scepticism. Out of this, a few promising use cases and applications have emerged, and the ecosystem is moving forward with designing and building for scale. However, several questions critical to the success or failure of blockchain remain. As catalogued elsewhere, regulatory clarity remains a significant hurdle for many organizations. In addition, technical and governance aspects such as interoperability, security and models for ecosystem collaboration will have significant impacts on the technology. 1,2 With the exploration of applications such as digital currencies and supply chain management which would fundamentally alter our ways of interacting and doing business there is an increasing need for common ground. We are seeing the emergence of initiatives that aim to bring greater definition to the new business models, platforms and infrastructure that blockchain demands and enables. There are certainly places where standardization is needed now and others where it is too soon. Philosophical debates about the technology remain. And it is important that movements towards standardization do not come at the expense of a careful evaluation of trade-offs related to technical architecture and governance. Decentralized technologies also introduce new possibilities for standard-setting across the ecosystem. As outlined in the paper, new ways of working are challenging existing models that may offer unique features or flexibility. The full scope of pros and cons remain to be seen, so it is important to continue to track the areas where new efficiencies and risks may come into play. Finally, standards have the potential to help level the playing field in the development of blockchain but only if they are designed and implemented thoughtfully. Without proactive attention to how standards are created and who is creating them, it is possible that they will be shaped according to specific interests and orientations and potentially in the image of hegemonic powers or legacy systems. There has been a proliferation of activity around technical standardization. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the landscape to: 1) map the technical standardization efforts under way; 2) identify gaps and areas of overlap; 3) identify critical next steps for the ecosystem. Notably, the aim of this paper is not to pass value judgements on the standardization efforts that are under way, and inclusion in this report is not an endorsement of any activities. Rather, it is an attempt to raise awareness of activities being undertaken and present trends as of the authoring of this report (August 2020). As we have seen in the past, adoption of standards is ultimately determined 1 1.1 1.2 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 4by a variety of factors. We expect the mapping to be used by blockchain service providers, policy- makers and standard-setting organizations to inform their approach to standard-setting activities and to the implementation of technical standards. The paper maps standards that focus broadly on distributed ledger technology (DLT) in order to take a comprehensive view of the evolution of standards. The terms “blockchain” and “distributed ledger technology” are used interchangeably throughout the report for simplicity and succinctness, though the authors recognize the practical distinctions particularly as they relate to technical standards. For the purposes of this paper, “blockchain standards” are defined as conventions that guide the development and use of DLT. They are established by industry and traditional standardization bodies. The paper takes a broad outlook on “standard- setting bodies” or “standard-setting entities” in order to map the wide ecosystem contributing to technical standards. This can include traditional standard- developing organizations (SDOs) as well as industry groups and developer communities. Methodology The mapping is based upon: 1. An in-depth literature review exploring existing efforts being made towards standardization of DLT 2. Technical interviews to validate the observations from desk research and better understand the implications for DLT standards development 1.3 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 5Context 2 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 6The evolving development of standards Standards are generally created and adopted in one of three ways (adapted from the Handbook of Innovation and Standards): 8 By convention (de facto standard) a practice, behaviour or configuration becomes broadly accepted through repetition and use, for example, designations of right and left By fiat (de jure standard) imposed by an edict or regulation by a government or other institution. Examples include Standards Australias activities and the US Securities and Exchange Commissions de jure standards on token management 9 By negotiation as agreed formally among stakeholders in an activity or enterprise, such as those created by formal standard- developing organizations (SDOs) as discussed later in the paper 2.2 A closer look: blockchain standards In some ways, blockchain upends traditional models of standard-setting, given the decentralized governance and ability to embed standards within the build of the protocol. Other areas have mimicked structures used to create coherence in distributed systems such as the internet. 2.3 The role of standardization in the First, Second and Third Industrial Revolutions is well documented particularly in their role of establishing an “information infrastructure” upon which new products and marketplaces could be built. 3 While standards will have a part to play in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in which emerging technologies are swiftly changing lives and transforming businesses and societies standard- setting bodies have new challenges ahead. There are unique considerations presented by areas of technological convergence, especially as they relate to highly standardized verticals such as healthcare. Moreover, Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies enable new realities and operating models. For instance, standards related to blockchain must grapple with decentralized governance. 4 The evolving role of standards It may be helpful to think about the types of standards in terms of their intended function. Appendix A outlines how standards may contribute to objectives of variety reduction, specification of quality and reliability, provision of performance- related information and assurance of interoperability. 7 Today, we can send emails to anyone with a valid address regardless of whether they use the same email client, domain or type of computer. The lay user takes for granted the consistencies across our email sending and receiving experiences: To and From fields, sending to an address with an “” sign, and a distinction between read and unread emails. This unified experience is the result of a robust set of standards that specify how an email is processed, transmitted, retrieved and more. For instance, you can send an email from an Outlook account to a Gmail account with different domain names without any extra friction or steps. Users may recognize acronyms such as “SMTP”, “DNS”, “POP” and “IMAP”. While this is an overly simplified example, it illustrates how technical standards and protocol facilitate seamless communication and the creation of a market in technical services. 5,6 Standards in action: emails BOX 1 2.1 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 7Software development Software development consortia bring together many stakeholders to share and jointly develop underlying software for these networks: think of the Free Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation and even the Linux Foundation. 23 Usually these consortia do not fund development work or write the software code directly. Rather, they serve an “air traffic control” function in managing software development processes. Software is usually the adhesive between multiple standards and the end users. Depending on the structure of the process, software development may not need the same consensus orientation as standard-setting initiatives. Additionally, software is continuously updated for instance, to add new features and fix bugs while standards have more constraints on releasing updates. Many of the widely recognized applications of blockchain are enabled by ERC token standards, which define the motivation, specification and implementation for Ethereum-based tokens. 21 Token standards are managed via the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) process, which is run on GitHub. Case Study: ICOs, CryptoKitties and more ERC token standards Examples of ERC Tokens Named according to their Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC) identifier, notable examples include (taken from the token standard): 22 BOX 2 Familiar standard-setting entities, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO), continue to develop voluntary information technology standards. 10 Some, such as ISO and IEEE, among others, have formed dedicated working groups on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, but their focus areas and outputs are early-stage. 11,12 Adopting a similar model, some industry-specific standards bodies, such as GS1 (the group that manages the barcode namespace and other supply- chain standards) or the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), also have blockchain working groups. 13,14 In the blockchain and related applications arena, a few industry groups, such as the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA), Interwork Alliance (IWA) and Distributed Identity Foundation (DIF), focus on blockchain standards. 15,16, 17 Protocol-specific standards processes have also been implemented in a decentralized manner through “improvement proposals”. These are managed by the developer community and often facilitated through the open-source platform GitHub. Some examples include Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and zCash Improvement Proposals (ZIPs). 18,19,20 ERC-20 ERC-721 The following standard allows for the implementation of a standard API for tokens within smart contracts. This standard provides basic functionality to transfer tokens, as well as allowing tokens to be approved so they can be spent by another on-chain third party. The following standard allows for the implementation of a standard application programming interface (API) for non-fungible tokens (NFT) within smart contracts. This standard provides basic functionality to track and transfer NFTs. Enabling smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi) e.g. Chainlink, Maker, Augur Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) e.g. EOS, Telegram, Tezos Stablecoins e.g. Tether, USDC, Paxos Blockchain collectibles and games e.g. CryptoKitties, Gods Unchained Standard Abstract Known for Standard-setting 2.4 Global Standards Mapping Initiative : An overview of blockchain technical standards 8Network governance Beyond standards: industry norms Standards are optional by nature they are either used or not. Historically, there was a need for bodies to adjudicate disputes on a living, breathing network composed of many different participants and agendas. Organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), or even informal groups such as North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) stepped up to fill this need. More involved with formal policy, these organizations need to balance uptime and usability with inclusivenes
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