Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
The European branch of the organization of financial institutions and technology providers – the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) has drafted a proposal for 10 blockchain benchmarks, reports CoinDesk. The organization has invited all interested parties in the financial technology and services sectors, IT and the academics to discuss and participate in the development of the benchmarks.
The aim of the project is to help standardize the growing number of diverse blockchain tools available already on the market and make sure the new ones would comply with them.
According to Gary Wright of the ISITC Blockchain DLT Working Group, a unified standard would not only ensure interoperability among the various solutions, but would also be a major step towards improving the profits and minimize the expenses of the companies that use distributed ledger technology (DLT). Besides, the standardization will enhance the efficiency of decentralized data sharing.
“We won’t be able to sell anything unless people understand what we’re selling and what they want to buy. It’s in our interest to standardize so people will invest,” Wright told CoinDesk.
According to Wright, if the project proves to be successful, the ISITC Blockchain DLT Working Group will take the benchmarks to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The benchmarks discussed at the working group meeting deal with blockchain resilience, scalability, latency, data structure, auditability, governance, legal jurisdiction, regulation and software version control.
Indeed, it seems that everybody is on the blockchain bandwagon, developing their own DLT projects and solutions. Only in the past several months SMN reported of Deloitte setting up its own blockchain lab, IBM working on two blockchain projects – with the French bank Credit Mutuel Arkea and Singaporean government agencies, while the Irish fintech startup FXCH (the FX Clearing House) announced it has successfully accepted and novated its first institutional forex spot transactions using DLT.
Central banks and various authorities sitting idle either: Russia’s c-bank has set up a blockchain consortium, the Bank of Canada is running its own tests and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is analyzing DLT to find out if it poses a risk to the financial markets.