Enterprise Ethereum Alliance launches initiative to apply standards to tokenization

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has announced a new initiative that aims to clearly define a token in non-technical and cross-industry terms, allowing anyone to easily understand them.

By universally defining tokens, the Token Taxonomy Initiative will help to better understand how their use and implementation can occur interchangeably across all token-enabled blockchain platforms.

While the concept of tokenization is increasingly going mainstream, there is a lack of a venue where all participants can work together to describe how tokens can eventually interoperate across the multiple and disparate systems that make up a typical enterprise infrastructure. The initiative will address this need and define a standard taxonomy and accelerate its adoption by making it easier for all to create tokens to serve their respective business use cases.

“Standardizing tokens to work anywhere could hold the key to one of the greatest economic opportunities in modern history,” said EEA Executive Director Ron Resnick.

“Just like standards that led to the rise of e-commerce on the internet, applying standards to tokenization will enable the enterprise to use tokens to serve as, or provide access to, a set of goods, financial assets, securities, services, value or content through enterprise blockchain applications.”

According to the press release, members of the initiative include Accenture, Banco Santander, Blockchain Research Institute,Clearmatics, ConsenSys, Digital Asset, EY, IBM, ING, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Komgo, Microsoft, R3, and Web3 Labs, among others. Marley Gray, EEA board member and principal architect, Microsoft, will be the Token Taxonomy Initiative Chair.

The initiative will create a common set of tokens and control capabilities, including defining a token in non-technical and cross-industry terms and establishing a common set of terms and definitions for use by business and technical participants.

It will also create a Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF) and educate and collaborate with structured Token Definition Workshops (TDW) to define new or existing tokens. In addition, the initiative will define meta-data using the TTF syntax and grammar to enable generating visual representations, such as a token hierarchy or token design and be extensible for mapping TTF definitions to token solutions, implementations or source code for any platform

“As blockchain adoption accelerates, it’s important to work together to develop a common understanding of the token model, provide a common set of definitions, and assure interoperability through best practices and standards,” said Gray. “With a standardized global approach, the Token Taxonomy Initiative will form the foundation of critical standards in tokenization that could streamline the way entire industries and ecosystems work on a blockchain.”