Interoperability of Blockchains
Easy thing to say the past few years is that
Blockchain is the Next Internet
But the Internet that we enjoy today has three decades of development put into it.
Doing research on the Financial market infrastructure's (FMI's) and how they serve as a central hubs for different financial institutions and their interaction between each other, I questioned myself about today's interoperability of the different Blockchain ledgers.
First lets get back to the Internet and its early days when there were few ways of constructing computer networks. The architecture design of the Internet an ARPANET favored military values over commercial goals. The DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) by which the Internet architecture project was funded had 7 fundamental goals for it. The first three were main and those were
1 - Survivability: Internet communications must continue despite the loss of networks or gateways
2 - Variety of service types: The Internet must support multiple types of communications service
*it was this goal that resulted in the separation into two layers of the TCP layer and IP layer, and the use of bytes (not packets) at the TCP layer for flow control and acknowledgement
3 - Variety of networks: The Internet must accommodate a variety of networks.
*Internet architecture must be able to incorporate and utilize a wide variety of network technologies, including military and commercial facilities.
(the remaining goals: distributed management of resources, cost effectiveness, ease of attaching hosts, and accountability in resource usage)
Fast forward 30 years and we have
- TCP/IP protocol that routes the information from point A to point B and doesn’t care about the validity of information.
- SSL/TLS protocol standards that can guarantee the integrity of information's communicated between clients and servers by combination of public key and symmetric key encryption.
- Blockchain protocol that now guarantees validity and order. Or (I) and (ii) together
It might be early to speak, but we are faced (going to be) with the same administrative boundaries as the Internet in the late 80’s. So maybe its a good time to calm our horses and start re-thinking about interoperability instead of non stop creating new chains? Organizations and consortium are developing different blockchain technologies to differentiate themselves from one another. And I understand the need of Permissioned design versus advanced cryptography for public permissionless blockchain. But we can start thinking about exchanging information's between ledgers.
In a recent paper published by MIT Connection Science on the topic of Design Philosophy for Interoperable Blockchain Systems the authors propose how a concept from the Internet protocol can come handy. Suite called the Datagram which is a common unit of information that can move across different networks can help to build the future interoperable blockchains.
Numerous designs emerged for he development of the Internet. Numerous designs are going to emerge as proposals for Blockchains and DLT’s. Interoperability across blokchain systems will be new topic to tackle and it should be considered as a core requirement for the future of Blockchains. The difference between the development of the Internet and the development of the Blockchain are the trillions being invested in the second one. How will it evolve nobody knows.
So tell me what are your thoughts about it? Any ideas how the mergers will or will not happen? Suggestions and pointing out mistakes are welcomed. I hope that I will continue writing the explanations that I research for my questions.
Resources
- Towards a Design Philosophy of Interoperable Blockchain Systems
- How to get blockchains to talk to each other - MIT Technology Review
Blockchain(s) and how they can intercommunicate with Polkadot
