Neo and Chainlink join InterWork Alliance to advance token-based economy

The InterWork Alliance (IWA) has launched operations as a platform-neural non-profit entity, aiming to create global standards for “token-enabled” ecosystems. According to the Alliance, token-based economies display huge promise, with distributed applications possessing the ability to “disrupt” global economics.

However, the IWA explained that different platform types and their wide-scale availability have obstructed the adoption of tokenization and token-based assets. The consortium opines that a standard framework will allow companies to “agree on” distributed business models without shedding time on choosing a token model. 

The Alliance will set the standards for building distributed applications, including appropriate frameworks for tokenizing items of value, writing contracts over those tokens, and privacy-preserving analytics of multi-party data. Some of the launch members of the Alliance include Accenture, Hedera Hashgraph, NEO global development and Chainlink. The IWA informed that all interested parties are invited to join the Alliance and bolster the token-based economy.

Ron Resnick, the President of IWA, said that many firms are looking to build token-backed models without a platform in mind. For this, standards need to be developed and followed. These include defining what a token is and how blockchain-based contracts work. He added: 

The Alliance was created to serve as an organization where this essential work happens. By bringing great technology and innovative business leaders together to deliver the market-driven specifications needed to facilitate interworking, the Alliance can deliver a proven, standard approach that is required to bring consumer trust into this space.

The IWA will provide businesses with frameworks needed to create standardized token definitions and contracts in business terms and then turn them over to developers for coding on any platform they choose. 

Commenting on the agency’s work, Marley Gray, principal architect at Microsoft and IWA Chairman, said: 

It 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.