Neo has announced it is joining the InterWork Alliance (IWA) as a founding sponsor member alongside Microsoft, Accenture, SDX, and Digital Asset, to realize its vision of the “Next-gen Internet” (NGI). NGD Seattle’s John deVadoss will sit on the board of directors. Other launch members include companies such as IBM, Nasdaq, UBS, Hedera Hashgraph, DID Alliance, Hyperledger, and more. The IWA is a non-profit organization that aims to empower organizations to adopt protocol-agnostic token-powered services and dApps.

 

To accelerate mainstream adoption at the business level, the IWA intends to establish a series of frameworks that create standardized token definitions and contracts in non-technical, business terms. The aim is to turn these frameworks over to developers so they may code them on any blockchain platform of choice.

The first framework, the Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF), provides token classifications and definitions intended to bridge the gap between blockchain developers, business executives, and regulators. Standards set by the TTF have already been implemented in NGD Seattle’s Visual Token Designer.

The second framework, the InterWork Framework, will allow businesses to more easily compose multi-party contracts based on clauses that correlate to token standards, as well as define and enable communication protocols that are connected to the framework.

The third framework, the Analytics Framework, aims to offer privacy-preserving analysis of multi-party contracts, and share data for artificial intelligent (AI) services and market-driven data reports.

In addition to Neo’s general participation in the IWA, Neo Global Development (NGD) Seattle lead, John deVadoss, will also serve as Chair of the Tools Steering Committee. In this role, deVadoss aims to work alongside IWA partners to “optimize developer experience by developing a shared language and toolset, thus enhancing interconnectivity and cooperation.”

Assuming the role of president is former Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) executive director, Ron Resnick, who announced his departure from the EEA in March 2020, citing a desire to “do some more to help the ecosystem unify.” In an ITA press release, Resnick expressed that “companies want to be able to create token-based business models without having a platform technology in mind” and that “standards are urgently needed around defining what a token is and how its contractual behaviors will work.”

On the announcement of joining as a founding board member, Neo founder, Da Hongfei, said:

Digital assets are at the core of Neo, and we’re excited to come together with IWA together to drive mainstream adoption by developing standards which will foster greater interconnectivity and cooperation at all levels. Moreover, I believe we are at the precipice of a global paradigm shift, one that will usher in the smart economy of the future. To that end, we are building Neo3 while working together with our IWA partners to realize mass adoption of blockchain and build the foundation for next-gen Internet.

The full announcement can be found at the below link:
https://neo.org/blog/details/4198

 

A correction was made to this article to clarify that Neo is a founding sponsor member, and that John deVadoss sits on the board.