Hi DFINITY Community,
As a blockchain layman and Internet Computer-newbie I wonder about Unified Ledger and how we deal with it?
The term Unified Ledger, so far used in accounting, has gotten an additional meaning, as a type of financial market infrastructure. As far as I understand it aims to capture the benefits of tokenisation by combining central bank money, tokenised deposits and tokenised assets on a programmable platform, thus there should be symbiotic potential with our Internet Computer ecosystem and its increasingly capable smart contracts.
In the Blockchain Strategy of the European Union the new connotation of the term doesn’t show up yet.
In February 2023 the Bank for International Settlements (BIS - an umbrella group for central banks) gave this keynote in Singapore: Innovation and the future of the monetary system (interpretation by Tim Hinchliffe), referring to Unified Ledger and in June 2023 published: III. Blueprint for the future monetary system: improving the old, enabling the new (PDF version ; interpretation by Camomile Shumba and by Christopher Jeffery).
Early October 2023, the Bank of Korea announced a wholesale CBDC pilot to support tokenized deposits, building on the Unified Ledger concept.
When looking at standardization efforts in the world of financial technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT), in order to conceive a universal standard designed to seamlessly harmonize DLT with legacy financial infrastructure, potentially relevant is ISO 20022, aiming to be a backbone for financial messaging. Contributing to ISO 20022’s further development are the technical committees ISO/TC68 (Banking, Securities and other Financial Services) and ISO/TC307 (Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies).
Here on DFINITY forum @rdobrik has launched the related discussion: ISO20022 compatible ICP smart contracts. I wonder whether the issue of Unified Ledger is sufficiently covered there (even though not mentioned by name)?
ISO/TC68 and ISO/TC307 are not yet discussed on DFINITY forum.
Furthermore, a quick glance to the analogy of “UC” (Unified Communications) might help to gain an additional perspective of names as an common property destined for open standard development: Where the UC-backing MEF (global industry association) are competing for influence in shaping the industry standard for IM, VoIP and headset technologies with Microsoft’s “MS Teams”-compatibility.
The question boils down to:
Is Unified Ledger a meaningful portmanteau which for our community it is worth to stand behind and build towards or is just another marketing fad (against the premise of diverse decentralisation) we can ignore?