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Exclusive: How to Achieve Interoperability Between Polkadot and Bitcoin?

Polkadot has caught widespread attention among blockchain project investors recently. Founded by Ethereum Co-founder Gavin Wood and managed by Web3 Foundation, Polkadot recently completed its private token sale with 500,000 DOT tokens at the valuation of $1.2 bn.

Claimed as the candidate of Decentralized Web 3.0 Blockchain interoperability platform, what makes Polkadot so popular? We are glad to speak with Jack Platts, Head of Collaborations of Web3 Foundation to share with us how Polkadot is interoperable with Bitcoin! He also explains the GRANDPA protocol of Polkadot and how Polkadot can interact with Ethereum!

To start off, can you briefly introduce Polkadot to our readers?

Polkadot attempts to abstract away security and interoperability so that a higher level, user-facing applications can focus on building products. We think of Polkadot as an infrastructure for infrastructure. Polkadot is developer-facing, and kind of handles the connection between many disparate blockchains, economies, and markets. You can think of it like the UN or the United States Federal Government, where the countries or states contribute but ultimately have their own fiefdoms and control over how their citizens live.

Talking about Polkadot, the project of Web 3 Foundation. Can you elaborate on what is GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement) consensus?

GRANDPA is the finality gadget used in Polkadot. It’s also a Substrate Runtime Module so anyone building a blockchain, whether for Polkadot or not, can use it too. The research team at Web3 Foundation created GRANDPA so that Polkadot could be scalable and secure. Rob Habermeier wrote a great blog post on the intricacies of GRANDPA and Alistair Stewart wrote a more technical paper for anyone interested. I’d encourage folks interested in consensus to check those out, as well as our Wiki.

Polkadot claims that it allows interaction with smart contracts in Ethereum. Can you elaborate on this can be done?

Web3 Foundation is providing grants to teams building bridges. One of the first bridges will be to Ethereum, but it’s important to note that Polkadot is not a smart contracts platform. It’s a networking protocol, a kind of trade a security agreement between blockchains. So by bridging in Ethereum, and having native parachains that provide smart contracts like Edgeware, all other blockchains connected to Polkadot can use smart contracts and the state of those contracts, too.

How to achieve interoperability between Polkadot and Bitcoin?

This would be done via a bridge chain. Polkadot can connect any previously existing blockchain if it matches two criteria:

It must have the ability to form compact and fast light-client proofs over the finality and validity of its blocks and state change information (this would include new UTXOs in a Bitcoin-like chain or logs in an Ethereum-like chain).
There must be a means by which a large set of independent authorities (perhaps up to one thousand) can authorize a transaction. This could include recognition of threshold signatures, such as the Schnorr scheme, or a smart contract able to structure logic against a multi-signature condition.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin-like chains fall short on these characteristics. To address the first criteria, Polkadot validators can simply run a full Bitcoin node. To address the second criteria, either a soft-fork allowing extra-protocol controls over funds or a hard-fork enabling a threshold-signature-friendly signing scheme such as Schnorr is needed. Neither are impossible goals, however, a significant degree coordination would be required to achieve them.

Exclusive: Can Web3 Foundation Achieve a Truly Decentralized Web?

Exclusive interview with Jack Platts: Part 2

Following the technical underpinnings of Polkadot in Part 1, Jack Platts, Head of Collaborations Web3 Foundation reveals their effort towards the goal of the decentralized web! He also explained the governance and technical challenges in achieving a decentralized web!

How Web 3 Foundation can achieve a truly decentralized web?

Web3 Foundation convenes, coordinates, and funds the projects, teams, and individuals that are building the frameworks for a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.

All of our research, grants, and events we view through the lens of the Web3 Technology Stack. The development of this inclusive set of interoperable and extensible protocols is the primary measuring stick by which we evaluate our progress. The Web3 Tech Stack guides how we approach research, collaborations, and grants. We’re most interested in funding and providing a platform for the protocols and pieces of the stack that are less monetizable or appealing to companies to tackle. That is where we as a Foundation can step in and act, and if everyone does their piece we will over time build a fully decentralized web together. For example, decentralized and private messaging is a piece of the stack that many applications need because currently, we rely on centralized services to handle our encrypted messaging if it is encrypted at all. So we are working with other teams in the space to research this problem and implement a solution. This type of thing is more difficult to monetize, so it’s great for us as a Foundation to step in and jumpstart the development so that downstream teams can build their own applications using the protocol.

Source: Web3 Foundation

The Web 3 Foundation aims to construct an internet where users are in control of their own data, identity, and destiny. What are the governance challenges in doing so?

Web3 Foundation only provides grants for open-source software. Everything we do we try to do in an open, transparent way. We try to foster that type of culture internally, and we have some work to do to be totally transparent. Some groups in the space do an even better job than us, like Aragon. It is difficult from a governance perspective to push open-source across the industry because there is money involved with some of these protocols and companies. But that is what we stand for: open-source, autonomous software.

What are the technical challenges in achieving syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability for the internet? How do you overcome these challenges?

From a technical perspective, it is difficult to have perfect interoperability when users need control and privacy. The blockchain is a great truth machine, but not always a great privacy machine. We employ and work with many cryptographers who are trying to solve these challenges so that use cases in health care and banking can also be interoperable. I like the analogy to the early Internet where Intranets ruled and private companies and systems dominated the industry. We’ve now come full circle and that is why Web 3.0 is so important. You have to trust that the private, closed systems are doing the right thing, and we’re building protocols that obviate the need for trust. We like the phrase “Less Trust, More Truth” for what we’re doing.

In the creation of a decentralized web, how do you compare the existing competitor, like Tron (TRX)?

As long as systems and applications are open and transparent about what they are and what they are doing I don’t think there is much competition in the space from one protocol to the next. There are probably too many smart contract platforms at this point, especially since they cannot talk to one another right now, but we mostly think about our competition as closed, proprietary systems that control and provide very little information about what they are doing with your information or how it is stored. Those types of applications are our competition. That is the status quo and we want to tear that down.

IBM Food Trust: Cutting Through the Complexity of the World’s Food Supply with Blockchain

Alan Lim, one of the initial members of the IBM Worldwide Blockchain team, heads IBM Blockchain Labs in the Asia Pacific. Blockchain.News sat down with Lim to learn more about IBM’s blockchain initiatives, including its Trust Your Supplier and Food Trust platforms.

IBM Food Trust was first launched in August 2017, with 10 Foundation members aiming to use blockchain in food traceability to solve issues in the food supply chain. Prior to the launch, IBM, Walmart, and Tsinghua University announced a collaboration to improve the way food is tracked, transported, and sold to customers in China. Juniper Research recently announced that IBM Food Trust is one of the leading blockchain players in the food provenance space.

Since the launch of the IBM Food Trust, millions of transactions have been entered onto the blockchain, as the technology provides transparency and efficiency in supply chain record-keeping to help ensure food safety for consumers. “I think the problem we’re trying to solve is the issues around the current food supply chain. Whether it’s related to issues around food safety, issues around the freshness of food, there’s an opportunity for being more efficient,” Lim added.

The dire need for trust and transparency

Lim explained that the food supply chain is quite complex, as the ecosystem consists of an extensive range of farmers, growers, packing houses, distribution centers, retailers to the consumer. “There is a dire need for a common view across the value chain to establish trust, but not just the ability to track and trace but true transparency across the different parts of the ecosystem.”

“One thing that we realized very early on is the need for standards. We’ve been partnering with various industries, parties, and associations,” said Lim. He also mentioned that the IBM Food Trust has also investigated standards from GS1, a non-profit organization headquartered in Belgium that develops and maintains global standards for business communication. Lim believes that standards are very important, and the group is looking to onboard different parties from different parts of the ecosystem across the globe. “This becomes even more important, so we’re looking at how we can better partner and adopt some of these standards, whether it’s uniquely identified produce, whether it’s looking at better ways of tracking, including the life cycle of the product,” explained Lim. “With the adoption of standards, we think that would be a key enabler for us to be successful in this area.”

One of the design principles that the IBM Food Trust decided on was that the data provided by the different parts of the ecosystem remains in the different parts of the ecosystem, different players in the ecosystem will need to grant permission to another party in the supply chain to have the visibility of the data. Lim emphasized that IBM is just the solution provider and operator for the network and stressed the importance of the ecosystem.

Interoperability of IBM Food Trust

From a data model perspective, Lim explained, “If we’re able to conform on the same data standards, it makes it easier for information to be shared by different networks and systems, platforms that are on blockchain and those that are not.”

Lim mentioned that the design of the interoperability of the solution is a more advanced kind of adoption; however, integration is more complex. “With the integration, we have to put in place interfaces, which are standard-based through APIs and companies that are looking to integrate with the IBM Food Trust solution can do so using those established APIs to be able to connect in, publish information, and retrieve information about the food supply chain.”

The IBM Food Trust has convened an advisory council made up of different parts of the ecosystem. As described by Lim, some parties are even competitors with each other. “The idea is to ensure that the principles are being followed very closely.”

How Can Blockchain in IoT Market Grow 180 times by 2026?

How Blockchain in IoT is Transforming the Modern World

The combination of Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain has appeared to be one of the most exhilarating use cases for the modern era of technology. New opportunities are opened up by adopting IoT-based technologies in various aspects of our daily lives, such as manufacturing, intelligent transportation, and home automation. With the evolution of embedded network and computing hardware technology, the combination of blockchain in IoT technologies makes the large-scale autonomous systems of IoT to come into being. Two big companies, Bosch and Volkswagen believe that the IoT market places and the decentralized data should co-exist.

Before understanding how the combination of IoT and blockchain can bring change to the world, let us first find out what is blockchain and what is IoT.

What is Blockchain?

Based on the concept of a decentralized network, the blockchain technology processes and records transactions securely and transparently. Blockchain is a chain of blocks that comprehend the digital records, which cannot be deleted or altered when added to the blockchain. These saved records are distributed across all the nodes in the network. Every node contains an updated copy of the ledger at all times.

When it comes to saving data or processing payments, every technology company whether it is Uber or Airbnb pretends as a centralized entity. Based on decentralization concepts, blockchain protects the data from a few centralized bodies, which reduces the risk of information hacking or theft.

What is IoT?

A smartphone is the best example to better understand the basics of IoT. Today, a smartphone is the most essential device used for many of our needs from playing games, listening to music, watching movies, communicating with peers, checking messages or emails.

However, the phone did not have all these capabilities a few years ago. People could only make a call or send a message on their mobile phones.

The advent of internet facilitates the connection between mobile phones in file sharing and data transfer. This is the basic principle of IoT that the devices or objects become “smarter” when connected to the internet. There are 3 categories of IoT devices:

Things that act based on the data received

For example, smart TVs, wearable devices, and 3D printers take action after collecting data from the sensors.

Things that transmit information based on data collected

For example, light sensors, moisture sensors, and motion sensors, moisture sensors send relevant data for improved decision-making.

Things that fulfill both functionalities

To find the amount of water needed by the crops, the sensors of IoT based farming gather information about soil moisture. Therefore, it is crucial to protect the information throughout its lifecycle as the efficiency of IoT relies on the information existed in the system.

Why IoT needs Blockchain?

The dependency of IoT on centralized communication in order to interact with the system is its biggest drawback of IoT. All the devices in IoT setup are recognized, linked and authorized via centralized cloud servers. However, networking equipment and centralized clouds used in the present IoT solutions have high infrastructure and maintenance costs. As IoT systems are associated with these service areas, scalability can become a critical issue.

As the sum of IoT devices surges, the cost for the number of interactions between the devices also increases. This is a major reason for large IoT networks don’t get support from the current systems.

Cloud servers are helpless to a single point of failure. This means that the entire ecosystem can be affected at a certain point. As revealed by Microsoft’s survey, 97% of respondents are concerned about the security of IoT devices and infrastructure, which partly explained that 30% of IoT projects failed in the Proof-of-Concept stage. Therefore, instead of using a server/client model, making use of a peer-to-peer model instead can be a precise solution that the IoT industry needs.

With decentralization in place, computation and storage needs can be distributed across millions of IoT devices. Therefore, the use of blockchain in IoT can benefit the IoT devices to scale up proficiently.

How can Blockchain Help in IoT?

As the blockchain is decentralized and tamper-proof, it can do what IoT precisely requires. Billions of connected devices can be tracked in the network by using blockchain IoT. With the increased integration between IoT devices and blockchain across industries, the global blockchain IoT market is estimated to grow exponentially and is forecasted to a market size of $5.8 billion by 2026, compared to 32 million in 2018.

Integrating the blockchain in IoT devices can also lower the costs of managing and installing servers for an IoT network. The cryptographic algorithms are used by blockchain to ensure the security and confidentiality of the data existing on the IoT network. As blockchain IoT does not have a single thread of communication, it also protects the network from the man-in-middle attacks.

Here are some of the exciting use cases of Blockchain IoT:

· Supply Chain & Logistics

When blockchain is combined with IoT, the traceability of the supply chain network can be improved. IoT sensors like GPS, motion sensors, or temperature sensors connected to the vehicles provide the info of shipment status. Blockchain stores the data, when it is fetched from the sensors. This brings transparency, auditability, and traceability in the system.

· Smart Homes

IoT devices play a major role in allowing smartphones to control the home security system. However, the centralized model of IoT that exchanges information generated by IoT sensors lack security standards and ownership of data. When the gathered data is moved from IoT devices to the blockchain it can solve many security issues.

· Parking Solutions

NetObjex company has come up with an idea of a smart parking solution with blockchain IoT. IoT sensors are used in the smart parking technology by which, the car drivers can automatically with crypto wallets and can also find the empty parking space easily. There are several industries who have now started to experiment with the potential of blockchain IoT networks.

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Ant Financial Launches OpenChain for China's Small Businesses to Leverage its Enterprise Blockchain Consortium

Ant Financial, the parent company of AliPay, has launched OpenChain, a new blockchain platform that gives developers and small and micro enterprises (SMEs) the power to leverage the Chinese blockchain giant’s proprietary blockchain consortium and efficiently and cost effectively deploy smart contracts and create decentralized apps (DApps).

Ant Financial Blockchain is the largest productivity blockchain platform in China with the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. It has topped the global ranking for blockchain patent applications for the past three consecutive years.

The main blockchain platform has already been extensively used in enterprise blockchain solutions for firms such as Bayer in agriculture and China Everbright Bank in supply chain finance.

Jin Ge, General Manager of Blockchain Platforms for Ant Financial said, “Applications of blockchain technology have ballooned over the past few years. Through the launch of the OpenChain platform, we aim to help one million SMEs and developers innovate and explore more use cases in the next three years,” in the announcement this morning.

OpenChain Features

The OpenChain offering provides developers with a variety of ready-to-go modules that can be used to build trust in multi-party collaboration. This is especially useful in area such as supply chain finance, product provenance, digital invoices and charitable donations.

As China drives its blockchain campaign and business are encouraged to assimilate the technology, the OpenChain platform could helps SMEs to greatly reduce development and deployment costs of the technology applications and allows them to focus on product and service delivery.

Open Chain Building Trust in China

Blockchain companies have become a hot property in China over the last year and the rise in company registrations has surged following Chinese Leader Xi Jinping’s announcement last October that the Middle Kingdom must strive to become the blockchain leader.

According to a report from China Finance, many larger businesses across China are blockchain companies in name only and in fact have little to do with the groundbreaking technology.

LongHash data reveals that of the 79,555 registered blockchain companies in China, only about 26,000 are operating and 57,000 have lost their license and legal status.

In the first quarter of 2020, as the Coronavirus disruption began to shut down factories, offices and cities in China, a further 2,383 brand-new blockchain companies emerged.

OpenChain could be a potential solution to the frenzy for small businesses as its main purpose is to build trust in commercial and transactional usecases, the success of which may depend on multiple party collaboration.

According to the release, “These use cases require not only a trust mechanism among all parties, but also high-performance consensus algorithms that can complete authentication computation on the fly. Ant Financial’s OpenChain also uses trusted computing capabilities to enhance data security and protection for the apps running on its platform.”

WhiteMatrix, a provider enterprise blockchain app development services, has been using OpenChain to develop smart contracts for developers since 2019 when it began its alpha tests.

Wu Xiao, the founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix said of OpenChain, “The platform offers efficient blockchain development services, facilitates cost-effective smart contracts, and lowers the entry barrier for developers. Not only are OpenChain’s transaction speeds several times faster than public blockchain platforms like Ethereum, but the cost per transaction is only one tenth of others.”

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From Zero Mentions to a Dedicated Section in CINIC Report: How Fast is Blockchain Growing in the Chinese Internet Industry

The China Internet Network Information Centre (CINIC) recently published “The 45th China Statistical Report on Internet Development”. Compared to the previous issue, it is worth noting that the CINIC covered blockchain development as a dedicated section in the latest report. The report highlighted the rapid blockchain development of China in three aspects: regulation, technical development, and applications.

On Oct. 25, 2019, China’s President Xi Jinping said at the study session of the Politburo held on Thursday that the nation should accelerate the development of blockchain technology. China has been actively pushing to standardize the use of blockchain technology, with 29 provinces published guidance in leveraging blockchain as of 2019. In Jan 2019, the CINIC published the Provision on the Administration of Blockchain Information Services, which encourages blockchain industry organizations to strengthen self-regulation and establish data standards.

Technical Blockchain Development in China

The report also indicated some remarkable progress in research and development (R&D) in blockchain technology. The improvement in blockchain architecture design can be reflected by the increasing number of blockchain patents obtained. In 2019, there are 964 patents regarding data storage in blockchain, 420 patents on smart contracts, 101 patents on consensus algorithm, and 42 patents on cryptographic technique. In addition, the increase in cryptography and privacy solutions such as secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption and the zero-knowledge proof has accelerated the development of blockchain technology. 67% of blockchains support state secret algorithm in China. The report also indicated a sharp increase in Chinese institutions studying the interoperability of blockchain, from 12 in 2018 to 35. Among the 35 institutions, there are 8 national research institutes and 19 enterprise research institutes.

Accelerating Blockchain Adoption

The report highlighted that blockchain has been actively applied in government service, finance and supply chain industry in China. The Chinese government believes that blockchain enhances trust in the current social structure. In government services, as blockchain provides the audit trail for all transactions, it mitigates the risks of government in data sharing with enterprises. For example, Shenzhen provincial government issues an application that enables identity verification using blockchain, supporting 24 types of identity documents and more than 100 routine government services.

In the financial industry, the use of smart contracts removes the need for a centralized party in the settlement process, which greatly reduces the settlement time and facilitates the trading of financial instruments. As of Dec 2019, the blockchain platform developed by the People’s Bank of China has processed over 90 billion in trade finance, including account receivables and cross-border financing transactions. The report also highlighted that the R&D of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) obtained official approval from the State Council, which provides a huge boost in developing China’s CBDC. In the supply chain industry, the CINIC stated that blockchain-based system facilitates upstream and downstream operations and facilitate the status of product tracking in real-time. The report highlighted a few use cases in Alibaba and JD.com for the authenticity of goods and services.

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India's Largest Shipping Port Operator Adopts Maersk-IBM Blockchain Platform

The Indian blockchain and crypto industry is looking ripe for disruption after the country’s central bank overturned a crypto ban earlier this year. Firms are adopting blockchain technology into their businesses and crypto-ventures are attracting foreign investments.

In the latest development, India’s largest port operator announced on May 27 it is adopting blockchain technology through its shipping and invoicing business.

India looks to blockchain

Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) has signed up with TradeLens, a blockchain-based platform jointly developed by Maersk and IBM. Cargo facilities at several Indian ports, including major ones like Vizag, Marmagao, and Mundra, will all be integrated on the platform soon.

The move comes after ports, governments, and corporations around the world are looking to integrate distributed computing and blockchain into their coffers, presumably to ensure verifiability and maintain higher levels of trust in a post-COVID environment. The shipping industry, particularly, depends on paperwork and a lot of legal hassles, and blockchain-based systems may help greatly to ensure smoother functioning.

A port official speaking to local paper Hindu Business Line stated: “During the pandemic, we realized the price of not digitizing the industry. There will be a mindset change now and more firms will adopt the technology.”

The TradeLens partnership will enable greater ease of doing business across the supply chain by replacing manual, time consuming administrative processes with digital procedures powered by blockchain technology.

Tradelens’ open-source blockchain protocol is support by major shipping firms and over 100 ports globally. The firm promotes the efficient and secure exchange of information to encourage collaboration between shipping participants and increase trust across international ports.

Each day, the firm pulls in data from partners and shares it for participants to access, reduce average times through improved efficiency and timeliness in the creation and distribution of shared documents like commercial invoices, bills of lading and packing lists that routinely get generated and exchanged between trading partners.

Cost savings are a huge benefit to firms. Tradelens estimates supply chain visibility and improved document flow can save Indian importers like the Jawaharlal Nehru Port up to $220 million a year, courtesy of lower transport and logistics costs.

If all Indian ports adopt the platform, the firm estimates savings of up to $860 million annually.

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Blockchain Interoperability—What are the Key Drivers?

Blockchain Interoperability, the ability for independently developed blockchains to connect to other blockchains and work together within the same ecosystem, is an increasingly desirable function amongst developers . But is it necessary to have interoperable blockchains? What problems do they solve and what are the various challenges involved in interconnecting blockchains?

Blockchain today is often likened to the Internet of the 90’s. As with the Internet, Blockchain has also seen its share of people who predicted its doom within a few years of its launch. But, like the Internet, Blockchain has weathered the storm and has moved into a phase of mainstream adoption. Blockchain is no longer seen as just a toy in the hands of a few crypto-geeks, but has gained the interest of big business.

Enterprise blockchains today could be compared to the state of business applications in the late nineties, when firms ran tailor-made applications for Finance, Supply Chain, and Customer Management in their data centers. These applications hardly interacted with each other. Then, the phase of ERP systems started, where all the business needs were packed into a single monolithic application. Later we moved back to having distinct applications for specific requirements, but this time, they were built to work together seamlessly with each other as if it were a single application.

As Blockchain interoperability has clear benefits, should companies start working on them right away? In this author’s opinion, the answer is “No”. Businesses should first understand what they are getting into, assess how their needs can be met by this new technology, and specifically what are the risks involved. Blockchains can be integrated in many ways – transferring digital assets from one network to another or transferring assets in one network while paying for it in another. Integrating multiple blockchains can be technologically challenging and the companies exploring the possible integrated blockchains, should not ignore the business and the legal difficulties.

What are the business considerations for an interoperable blockchain?

Clarity on the Use Case

Most often, companies indulge in new technology because of the fear of missing out. Instead, they need to determine the use cases where the integrating blockchain networks can add value. For instance, businesses using Enterprise Blockchains for managing their supply chain processes may choose to explore Corda for trade finance.

Incentives

What are the companies getting in return for sharing their valuable data with parties outside their network? Why should they be honest with the data they share? Monetary incentives will drive the companies, to be honest. Incentives also increase the cross-chain adoption. For instance, in a gig economy, if company A uses the background checks done by company B to fast track their employee onboarding, paying Company B for its service would encourage company B to share their data.

Governance

Preparing a governance model for different blockchain networks to work together is not an easy task. These networks might not have the same blockchain platform. For instance, digital assets transferred on a Hyperledger network, might be paid on the Bitcoin network. Public blockchains commonly have less stringent governance than the private ones. And private networks tend to have a closed governance ecosystem. Bridging the gap in the governance models of these networks is vital to building trust.

Legal and Regulatory compliance

Managing compliance across networks is a hard task. The laws and regulations that these blockchains have to adhere to increases with their geographies. Careful consideration of the applicable laws – Anti-money laundering, KYC, Antitrust, IP rights, and data privacy – across jurisdictions is essential. A bank on one blockchain platform might rely on the KYC checks done by another bank on another interconnected blockchain platform for a firm before granting them loans. Hence, adhering to compliance is crucial for interoperable blockchains as one network might rely on the compliance checks done by the other.

What are the Technology challenges to be addressed for interoperable enterprise blockchains?

Data Standards

Does “apples” in application A means “apples” in application B as well? This is always a concern when integrating different applications. Blockchain is no different. “Users” in blockchain A might mean “accounts” in blockchain B and “nodes” in blockchain C. Hence, it is necessary to have a common data dictionary for the interconnected ecosystem. Standardized data shared between the blockchain platforms leaves little room for error and increases its credibility. Besides, this reduces the technical challenges involved in integrating disparate blockchain systems.

Data Privacy and Security

Every blockchain network will have different data privacy and security standards. If a private blockchain has to interact with a public blockchain, is it possible to have agreeable data privacy standards? If a blockchain with three nodes has to interact with a blockchain with 100 nodes, is it possible to have the same security standards? How will one network trust another to maintain the same privacy and security standards? It is always beneficial to have a higher degree of security implemented in the system. Meeting the required data privacy needs is vital for the success of this newfound synergy between blockchains.

Interoperability

The next concern to be addressed is how to share data between these disparate networks. The whitepaper from World Economic Forum provides options for blockchain interoperability varying from using cross-authentication mechanisms to APIs depending on the type of blockchains being integrated.

Smart Contracts and Shared Consensus

Every blockchain platform uses different languages to write smart contracts. Some blockchain applications such as bitcoin do not have smart contracts. How do we ensure all the blockchain networks are agreeing to the same terms and conditions? How do we ensure the order of transactions in each blockchain network is the same? It is vital for all blockchains to have the same terms and conditions coded into their smart contracts. At the same time, using an independent ordering service will ensure all the blockchains have the same order of transactions.

What is the work currently going on?

Many big players, in the Blockchain ecosystem, are realizing the necessity as well as the complexity of blockchain interoperability. The World Economic Forum has included an interoperability module into its recently released toolkit, which guides the development of new Blockchain solutions.

In conclusion, interoperable business blockchains will unlock new potential use cases. But, the difference in business requirements, technology preferences, ideas of incentivization, and compliance requirements makes it difficult for using a single type of blockchain for every use case. There is no one-size-fits-all with Blockchain. A balance between trust, security, governance, and standards will enable the seamless flow of information between diverse blockchain networks.

Machine Learning Network Fetch.ai Shares Vision of Interoperable Blockchains

Fetch.ai has an interoperability vision to bring machine learning services to every ledger and blockchain.

In an email to Blockchain.News, Fetch.ai today announced its interoperability vision to bring machine learning services to every ledger and all chains. The AI network also gave us an update on their imminent upgrade to the Fetch.ai test network to incorporate a new performance-focused FET virtual machine, based on WebAssembly.

Fetch.Ai Upgrade

The Fetch.ai Virtual Machine (VM) went live in February 2019—and is a computer program that emulates a processor and is used to execute a smart contract when transactions are made across the network.

In the case of Fetch.AI and other distributed ledgers, the VM is critical as it enables smart contracts to be deployed and transactions to run in multiple places. In short, it enables a massively replicated execution of the smart contract across all computers on the Fetch.AI network, accounting for different types of hardware that may be involved. The VM is fully integrated with the Fetch.AI Smart Ledger so a record of each smart contract is stored.

Per the announcement on July 21, the Fetch.ai virtual machine will be upgraded on the test network later this week, along with new documentation to enable agent developers to prepare for the migration onto the live network.

Commenting on the announcement, Fetch.ai CEO, Humayun Sheikh said:

“This evolution in our network will in time unlock huge value for the Fetch.ai services, with new opportunities opening for every chain to access AI and machine learning services, powered by the FET token”.

Interoperability of Version 2.0

Fetch.ai is an artificial intelligence lab based in Cambridge, building an open access, tokenized, decentralized machine learning network. This open-source software stack allows organisations to build or configure applications on top of a digital representation of the world in which “software agents”, autonomously search, negotiate and transact. The planned version 2.0 of the Fetch.ai main net will be interoperable with Cosmos Hub and other chains such as Ethereum via Cosmos’ IBC bridge, with a roadmap to enable full cross-chain compatibility. Jonathan Ward, Fetch.ai, Head of Research said:

“This move allows our AI technology to be applied in areas where it has had greatest impact in the centralized world such as social networks, gaming and, of course, finance.”

Ripple Faces Trademark Lawsuit in Australia for 'PayID' Infringement

Ripple Labs, the blockchain and payments solutions company that developed XRP cryptocurrency, is facing a lawsuit by New Payments Platform Australia (NPPA) for allegedly violating intellectual property rights for the branding of ‘PayID’.

Australian Consortium Sues Ripple

The NPPA, a consortium of the major banks in Australia and set in place by the Reserve Bank of Australia for interbank payments and transfers, is suing Ripple for copyright infringement. Back in March 2017, NPPA had filed for the trademark of ‘Pay ID’ – with a space – in Australia and had secured it.

The consortium had followed up by also registering for ‘PayID’ – without a space – trademark rights. However, no trademark for ‘PayID’ was obtained officially, as the application for it ran out in April 2018. New Payments Platform Australia then re-applied on July 24, 2020 for the same trademark of ‘PayID.’

Meanwhile, in the US, Ripple Labs had filed for two ‘PayID’ trademarks on June 17, 2020, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In June, Ripple revealed the official release of their Open Payments alliance designed to enhance the interoperability between approximately 40 corporate and non-profit coalition entities. ‘PayID’ was to be leveraged for an effective global payment network to ensure efficiency for the transfer of assets digitally.

The move by the renowned XRP blockchain company sparked outrage from NPPA, and this consequently led to a lawsuit filed with the Federal Court of Australia against Ripple Labs Inc. The lawsuit was reported by journalist Rohan Pierce, who disclosed a screenshot of the legal document.

Was Ripple Aware of ‘PayID’ Branding by NPPA?

NPPA’s payment platform is currently leveraged by at least 60 Australia banks, such as Citi, HSBC, ANZ, and more, and it enables bank clients to send and receive money instantly through the digital platform. Transfers are received instantaneously and operate on a 24/7 basis. All that is required is an email address, a phone number, and the sum of the fiat transaction.

PayID is accepted in most cryptocurrency exchanges in Australia as well, including two members of Ripple’s Open Payments Coalition. The two entities associated with Ripple’s coalition are BTC Markets and Independent Reserve, and due to this alliance, it appears as though Ripple had known all along about the Australian PayID trademark of NPPA.

The lawsuit is currently pending and undergoing investigation by law officials.