Open Source and Standards Must Mesh for Blockchains to Succeed

Blockchains are great, but without the right data standards to go with them, some may never succeed. There’s a belief in some open source circles that standards can be consigned to the ash heap of history now that OSS development has become so central to information technology. While it’s true that today many use cases can be addressed with OSS where open standards would have been used in the past, that approach can’t solve all problems. Most obviously, although resolving interoperation issues through real-time collaboration among up and downstream projects may meet the need within the same stack, it doesn’t help that stack communicate with other software. Blockchain technology is an architecture where collaboration on software alone will often not suffice to meet the challenge at hand. There’s an article at CoinDesk this??this week that provides an excellent example of such a case, describing how collaborative development and agreement on data and other standards will be essential before the securities industry buys into the concept of using blockchains to support trading.