Is Blockchain’s age of interoperability finally on the horizon?

Word on the Block | Forkast.News

As the adoption of blockchain technology grows around the world, so have the barriers between blockchains in different countries and regions.

Much like the internet, which started out as small sets of nodes in universities before expanding globally to form an interconnected and far more useful World Wide Web, blockchain nodes — now distributed across the globe — are in need of greater interoperability.

“At the end of the day, the primary catalyst for blockchain is really its connectivity [and] it’s about decentralization,'' said John DeVadoss, the co-founder of InterWork Alliance (IWA), in a video interview with Forkast.News.

The IWA, a non-profit organization working on the adoption of tokens for day-to-day operations, recently announced its merger with the Global Blockchain Business Council. One of the IWA’s major projects to connect the blockchain space is building a Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF), which defines a common language, behaviors and properties for tokens. The TTF allows its users to choose what and how much they would use the framework.

Blockchain standards and national, unified infrastructure such as China’s Blockchain Services Network enhance the connections across global blockchain ecosystems. But mainstream adoption of the technology is still slowed down by other factors. DeVadoss believes that one of the main factors that is stagnating a global blockchain explosion is the misconception of the distributed ledger.

“Much of the mainstream enterprise IT world still thinks of blockchain as database because they are unable to see beyond the technology,” DeVadoss said. “There has never been a stack like a blockchain stack because none of them had economic protocols baked inside intrinsically.”

Despite what DeVadoss characterizes as a popular misconception of blockchain as a “trust machine,” he still sees the technology as beneficial, with adoption likely to continue exploding in the coming years.

“I have seen tremendous amount of uptake through the InterWork Alliance and — of course — now with the GBBC,” DeVadoss said. “There’s tremendous amount of latent interest and I think it’s going to explode over the next 18 months.”

Watch DeVadoss’ full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the IWA’s efforts to connect the blockchain space, how the blockchain is changing the business logic, and why data stored on the blockchain can't necessarily be trusted.