The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is launching a new group of industrial specifications for the blockchain.
ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), which brings together companies such as Intel, Huawei and Vodafone, has announced its interest in blockchain technology by creating the group Industry Specification Group.
DLTs applied to telecoms
Its mission: to explore the potential of DLT technologies (Distributed Ledger Technology).
The standardization body ETSI will thus examine how the blockchain can be used by the telecommunications ecosystem, as it explains in a blog post.
The group’s first meeting will take place on January 24 at Telefonica’s offices in Madrid, Spain. The line of work will be discussed during this kick-off meeting during which the group leaders will also be elected.
A potential of a billion dollars for the Telcos
It will above all be a question of exploring the private blockchain (permissioned in English).
This is because DLTs can be permissionless (public) or authorized (private).
While the general public is more familiar with permissionless DLTs thanks in particular to Bitcoin, authorized distributed ledgers are better suited to address more business-oriented use cases of interest to industry and government institutions.
ETSI’s new working group will focus on the challenges of how DLTs work, business use cases, functional architecture and solutions for their operation, which includes interfaces, APIs, protocols and data models, as well as other topics.
Blockchain represents a billion dollar opportunity (GlobalData study) for telecom companies, however, provided they take the measure and act proactively.
This is the whole objective of the Industry Specification Group dedicated to blockchain that ETSI is setting up.
