Chainlink, IBM, ING, Microsoft, NASDAQ, and R3 Among First to Join InterWork Alliance to Set Tokenization Standards

Top financial and blockchain industry companies have formed the InterWork Alliance (IWA) in a bid to standardize the business and enterprise tokenization market.

The alliance launched as a platform-neutral, non-profit organization, aiming to “create standard frameworks to boost the overall innovation and development of tokenized ecosystems.

At launch, the IWA comprised a total of 28 companies including traditional financial institutions such as NASDAQ, UBS, and R3; technological heavyweights such as Microsoft and IBM and blockchain companies including Accenture, Chainlink and Hyperledger.

Here is the full list:

A New Tokenization Standard

Over the past decade, the tokenization of assets has exploded, disrupting the global economy. But the privatization of this process may stall the wide-scale adoption of these assets. The IWA aims to solve this by developing a ‘standard way’ to create these tokens before selecting a platform to station your project.

InterWork Alliance President, Ron Resnick said:

“The Alliance can deliver a proven, standard approach that is required to bring consumer trust into this space.”

The standards set by the Alliance will govern the creation of distributed assets, dApps, build frameworks to tokenize traditional assets, writing contracts over these tokens and maintain security/privacy of user data.

Marley Gray, principal architect, Microsoft, and the InterWork Alliance Chairman also added:

“The IWA provides a forum where industry participants can take real-world use cases as diverse as improving carbon market efficiency or trade finance efficiency, and use the technology-agnostic token and contract definitions to foster interoperability and drive widespread adoption – that’s the big picture of what we need to do in the Alliance.”

The IWA Framework on Tokenization

The IWA will have three key levels of framework implementation:

First, the Alliance will focus on the “The Token Taxonomy Framework” which provides a universal language to define a token and what it entails.

Secondly, “The InterWork Framework” is the layer that would allow businesses to implement multiparty contracts (MPC), enabling communication between them even if they choose a different blockchain to deploy.

Finally, “The Analytics Framework” enables businesses to fully leverage the market data from the system while enhancing the highest levels of privacy and data security.

The IWA has received several commendations from top firms, including the World Economic Forum (WEF). Sheila Warren, head of Blockchain and Data Policy, and member of the Executive Committee, WEF, said,

“Endeavors that provide platform-independent opportunities for businesses to focus on how to define the token models and contracts they need like the InterWork Alliance does, are both timely and important.”