September 13, 2018 | Written by: Jerry Cuomo
In the 1830s the first Yellow Pages emerged as an organized directory of businesses. This had a profound effect on commerce and is an often-overlooked key contribution to the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, the Yellow Pages put businesses on the map and made them known to the world. Without it, a business was hidden and only visible to those who knew about it via invitation.
Similarly, in the late 1990s ICANN became the coordinator of several directories including the Domain Name System (DNS) that is central to launching the internet and the world wide web, by uniquely listing businesses names and address, thereby transforming them to publicly addressable and digitally interactable entities. We think blockchain is the third major wave of network technology (phone, internet, blockchain). But we were missing something, up until now.
Today, I am proud and excited to announce that we have joined the HACERA Unbounded Registry as a founding member. As the number of blockchain consortiums, networks and applications continues to grow we need a means to list them and make them known to the world, in order to unleash the power of blockchain. The Unbounded Registry, built on blockchain technology, provides a decentralized means to register, look up, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions, built to interoperate with all of today’s popular distributed ledger technologies, including The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, R3 Corda, EEA Quorum, Stellar Network and more.
What makes a private network private, or a public network public? Well, most private networks are unlisted. Unbounded gives these network solutions a change to be in the “yellow pages of blockchain,” and be publicly visible. As a founding member of several consortiums and a technology provider for others, we are frequently asked questions such as, “As a supplier, how can I join the TradeLens trade digitization blockchain,” and “What capabilities does LedgerConnect provide?”. Also, “Is the True Tickets network running, and how do I list a new event?” — by the way… the answer is yes, it’s running. With Unbounded, a solution user is one step closer to answering their questions themselves.
Since IBM began our blockchain journey, we have been committed to the development and use of open technologies. We realized from the start that you cannot do blockchain on your own; you need a vibrant community and ecosystem of like-minded innovators who share the vision of helping to transform the way companies conduct business in the global economy. We initially joined Hyperledger, and contributed the initial code for Fabric, to collaborate on blockchain for business, then the Sovrin Foundation for decentralized identity and we have also participated in the Stellar network for global payments.
IBM and HACERA have been working closely on blockchain technology for a while. HACERA was one of the first members of the IBM Blockchain ecosystem — going back to 2016 — including the HACERA and IBM release-managed Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 a year ago.
We see HACERA’s Unbounded Registry providing several key capabilities that addressed these common problems:
- Reserved naming for networks, applications and consortiums.
- The discoverability of blockchain networks and applications.
- A catalogue of domain-specific functions and services.
- An independent, open and shared blockchain backed platform to help us all with bootstrapping, launching and growing our communities.
By working with HACERA and other members of Unbounded Registry, we see a future where consumers and providers of blockchain services will be able to discover each other and begin transacting in a more secure way and where technology providers and consumers can innovate and integrate to create limitless and unbounded possibilities.
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