ETSI announced the creation of a new Industry Specification Group on Permissioned Distributed Ledger (ISG PDL).
The group will analyze and provide the foundations to operate permissioned distributed ledgers to be deployed across various industries and governmental institutions.
A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, linked together with cryptography. By design, the data from a blockchain cannot be modified. It is an open distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties in an efficient and secure manner. Distributed ledgers are mostly known for their use with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. However, they can also be used for digital identity attributes, object tracking, or the verification of service level agreements.
Distributed ledgers can be either permissionless (public) or permissioned (private). While permissionless ledgers are known by the general public through popular terms such as Bitcoin, permissioned distributed ledgers are better qualified to address the more business-oriented use cases that are of interest to Industry and governmental institutions.
The founding members of the Permissioned Distributed Ledgers group include Alastria, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Mineco, NEC, Telefónica, Vodafone. The updated list can be found on the ETSI Member Portal.
The new ETSI group will work on the challenges related to the operation of permissioned distributed ledgers, business use cases, functional architecture and solutions for the operation of permissioned distributed ledgers, including interfaces/APIs/protocols and information/data models as well as other topics.
