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The British bank Barclays and the London startup Clearmatics are inviting programmers to devise ways to connect ethereum with blockchains for the company like Hyperledger Fabric.
The interoperability challenge is hosted by Clearmatics and will use a model that includes its open source interoperability protocol, Ion. L & # 39; hackathon it will take place at the Barclays Rise Fintech hub in London on 5 and 6 February.
The importance of dealing with interoperability between the main corporate blockchain platforms is reflected in the large companies involved: a group of judges will be composed of representatives of the megabanks Barclays, UBS, HSBC and Santander. (The awards for the teams that found the most impressive solutions have not yet been announced.)
The consulting giant EY will observe the event and produce a results-based relationship (a role played by Deloitte in the latest Barclays DerivHack).
In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, Dr. Lee Braine, chief technology officer at Barclays, said:
"We would like to gain a greater understanding of the challenges and potential solutions for interoperability between different distributed registries.This interoperability can be complex and this hackathon will allow the industry to experiment with the Ion protocol and also provide feedback to the open project. source ".
Taking a step back, the corporate blockchain world has been reduced to around four major industry platforms. There are ethereum variants such as Quorum, developed by JPMorgan; the Hyperledger family of protocols; R3 & r; s Cord; and the Digital Asset platform.
Unless they can be made to talk to each other, these new systems risk recreating the island silos they would have to replace, undermining the blockchain business case as a factor of efficiency and lubricator of the trade. For example, a currency running on ethereum can not easily be traded for a security or bond tracked on Hyperledger without a way for each chain to verify the transaction on the other. On the other hand, a monolithic blockchain would undermine the alleged advantage of decentralization.
Sara Feenan, product strategist at Clearmatics He underlined that a single system of government "really creates a single point of failure and a single point of trust, neither we want something that is a coin or a token and we have to exchange it at some point during the journey."
In particular, he said, the interoperability between Hyperledger The fabric and etereum variants are important, not only because of the weight that the fabric carries in the company space, but also thanks to the growing links between the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and the Hyperleder Foundation.
"We [Clearmatics] they are members of the EEA and now there is this narration of Hyperledger and EEA that become members associated with one another at the end of last year, "Feenan said.
Braine said that Barclays will present a team of its own engineers to meet the challenge, but they will take a slightly different approach by trying to use Ion for interoperability between ethereum and Corda.
Ion the prize
Clearmatics, which is the technology provider for the Consortium of Utility Settlement Banks, has previously demonstrated how its Ion protocol can foster interoperability.
In May of last year, Ion helped a derivative based on blockchain to be originated on Clearmatics ethereum and settled on the axoni blockchain, which is also a fork of ethereum.
Chris Chung, blockchain engineer at Clearmatics, said that "Ion's great vision is interoperability with everything", adding that research on interoperability with Hyperledger Fabric began at the end of last year.
The USC project, which aims to create a central bank digital currency (CBDC), is also an important driver, Chung said, adding:
"We want to ensure that USC achieves the widest possible range of possible target regulation applications, which puts Ion heavily as an interoperability framework to expand the gateway for access to USC."
Interoperability solutions would facilitate so-called atomic swaps – cross transactions where both sides of the trade are completed at the same time, or neither is. Braine imagined that technology was first applied to relatively simple financial products such as foreign currency (FX) transactions before assuming "incremental complexity".
"Starting perhaps from a FX versus payment (PvP) payment with two different currencies, I can imagine the next steps," he said. This could then lead to delivery-versus-payment (DvP) – in which a non-cash asset as a security is exchanged for money.
"As many have pointed out in the past, existing national payment systems are quite efficient, the true value of these types of protocols comes when you have more complex products that benefit from atomic swaps because you are then able to reach an agreement faster with a reduced risk, "said Braine.
Pushing home the need to chat, John Whelan, Santander's digital investment banking manager, compared the way companies today work with multiple operating systems.
"There is no doubt that we will live in an environment where we will have multiple operating systems, if we want to use this analogy," he said. "And those operating systems will have to be interoperable with each other just as they are today, whether it's Android versus Windows or MacOS etc."
Barclays image via Shutterstock
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