A Closer Look into the InterWork Alliance
and how it would shape the future world
Mainstream adoption is always the center in discussions of the future of the blockchain industry. While blockchain’s decentralized, traceable and trustless characteristics make it a natural fit for many business applications, the prerequisite of redesigning business values and logics based on tokens and smart contracts hinders the big migration. Technical and operational barriers make blockchain a riskier and more expensive choice that many businesses are reluctant to experiment with. That’s why the launch of the InterWork Alliance (IWA) on 2nd June has become one of the most exciting news for the industry recently.
“Interworking” refers to the situation when 2 or more parties working with each other. In order for multiple parties to work together seamlessly, they need to communicate the interchange value based on value definitions (tokens) and transaction logics (contracts).
IWA is an association of private sector organizations, governments, academics, and civil society at large that share the vision of a world of collaboration built on digitally interchanging values as tokenized items. Its mission is to empower organizations to adopt and use token-powered distributed services in their day-to-day business operations such as commerce, exchange, and trade. Put it in simple words: IWA wants to create and promote universal standards in how value is defined, used and exchanged, so that mainstream businesses could digitize their operations with standardized tokens and contracts, and interwork with each other on a common basis.
IWA currently has 5 sponsor members: Accenture, Digital Asset, Microsoft, Neo and SDX. Other notable members include: Chainlink, Hyperledger, IBM, Nasdaq, R3, UBS, Web3 Labs and etc. According to IWA’s description, every member has an equal voice in pushing the below objectives forward:
- Standards and specifications: Achieve a commercially viable global ecosystem for all by publishing an open standards-based architecture and market-driven technical specifications.
- Testing and certification processes: Build trust in services and solutions credentialed by IWA through cost-effective and timely testing and certification processes.
- Promotion: Establish worldwide market leadership for IWA-certified solutions by heavily promoting our members’ brands and technologies.
There are 3 frameworks in IWA’s work:
- Token Definition — Token Taxonomy Framework, TTF: Enables multiple parties to define a common language to implement a token of value that can be exchanged or used.
- Contractual Definition — InterWork Framework, IWF: Allows multi-party contracts to be composed from clauses that directly correlate to the tokenization standards by defining communication protocols to connect to framework components regardless of the implementation of its technology.
- Analysis Definition — Analytics Framework: Delivers the ability to build privacy-preserving multi-party contracts and shared data schema for value-add AI services and market driven data reporting.
If we take a closer look into the IWA’s vision: A world of collaboration built on digitally interchanging values as tokenized items, I can’t help to realize its resemblance to Neo’s vision: Smart economy. The essence of economic activities is the definition and circulation of value. In a smart economy, all values have to be digitized, and tokenization is the blockchain version of digitization.
According to Marley Gray, the Chairman of the IWA Board and the Principal Architect of Azure Multiparty Engineering at Microsoft, IWA is looking at standardizing tokenization and also a set of clauses based on tokens that can be chosen to form smart contracts. As contracts are always unique depending on different use cases, it makes sense to provide templates with pre-defined clauses (like modules). The “contract maker” could first choose a template which is similar to the eventual contract he needs, remove clauses he doesn’t need, edit some of them, and add some new ones from the library.
The ideal world that IWA wants to create is one where all values and rules are built in composition frameworks around pre-defined values (TTF) and pre-defined contractual clauses (IWF) that interact with each other.
Imaging if we run a real estate agency dealing with second-hand homes. Now, we want all deals to be made automatic and digital. With the help if IWA, I can use the standardized tools to tokenize all my apartments with properties such as price, area, floor level, age of property, and behaviors such as “transferrable”, “insurable”, “tax-exemptible” and so on. With our tokens defined with properties and behaviors, we can then choose a template of “real estate transactions” from the IWF, remove the clauses that are only applicable for commercial properties , add some clauses that specifically for second hand deals, and I will edit the “hand-over” clause according to the actual handing-over process laid out by the seller. Eventually we could arrive at a contract like “If the price of this apartment is within buyer’s budget, the age of the property is within 10 years, the apartment is not on the first floor, the apartment is transferrable, insurable and tax-exemptible, then the deal is made.” During the contract design process, I don’t need to know read or understand the records at the property registry to verify it is “transferrable”– that’s between the seller and the property registry. I just need to make sure the records are properly connected to the apartment and give it a “transferrable” status. An apartment token with the ‘transferrable’ behavior already warrants that it can be legally transferred without having to produce any details of the underlying records, as long as my deal contract contains a clause utilizes the ‘transferable’ behavior.
The future world outlined by the IWA’s vision is intriguing. The route towards that vision is, however, not an easy one. How far could the IWA lead us and to what extend could it deliver its missions? It might be helpful to examine on the management team of the IWA.
First and foremost, we have Ron Resnick as the President of the IWA. Ron became an influencer in the blockchain industry when he previously served as the Executive Director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). With more than 25 years’ experience in business development, he has successfully grown high technology businesses and their ecosystems. With his experience and connections with the EEA, Ron is probably the best person to lead the work at the IWA.
On the technical side, Ramesh Ramadoss, PhD serves as the Technical Director of the IWA. Ramesh is a co-chair of the IEEE Blockchain Initiative. He has been a member of IEEE since 1999. In 2013, he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior Member. He has previously conducted R&D projects for DARPA, NASA, US Army, US Air Force, Sandia National Labs, and Motorola Labs. He is the author or co-author of 1 book, 3 book chapters and 55 research papers.
Besides the management team, there are also key figures from the 5 sponsor members joining the Board of Directors. This lineup is quite a boost in confidence as we see a great blend of technical and business professionals, with a heavy focus on the blockchain technology.
- Chris Clason: Director of Strategic Alliances at Digital Assets;
- John deVadoss: Head of NGD Seattle and Director of Enterprise Adoption;
- Tim Grant: CEO of SIX Digital Exchange (SDX);
- Marley Gray: Principal Architect of Azure Multiparty Engineering at Microsoft;
- David Treat: Senior Managing Director — Global Blockchain & Multi-Party Systems Lead at Accenture
While it’s important to admit that there is still a long way ahead for a large-scale adoption of blockchain technologies, it would be even more important for us to stay aligned and always looking for opportunities to work together towards our mission. The EEA has already made significant impact of blockchain technologies in the mainstream industry, and now with a clearer direction and strategy, we have very good reason to believe that the IWA will bring us further on tokenization and nearer to the future.
Author: Adam Yang
Reference: https://interwork.org/
