A Call for Digital Standards

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has called for a ‘digital Bretton Woods’ to set standards for digital currency and trade systems. Its call comes in the context of today’s digital platforms that handle more than just finance, but trade, tax and audits, and it does this across borders.

Some of these base the necessary ‘trust’ on open alliance legal agreements, think Visa or Mastercard, while others used Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) with end-to-end encryption. Examples are Singapore’s Project Ubin which has taken five years of testing and development to be launched. Swiss Trust Chain is a live platform, but its commercial applications are still being worked on.

For these trust chains to work, the existing internet protocols need protection to allow them to be used cheaply, easily and securely for business purposes. To reach their full potential across payments, taxes, shipping, customs etc, uniformity needs to be created in a situation involving legacy systems, different legal basis and where there is significant complexity. Particularly with personal data privacy in mind where companies and governments are involved, data has to be simultaneously accessible, standardised and protected.

The sorts of technology being deployed to achieve this are federated Artificial Intelligence (AI) ¹, DLT, open legal alliances and data exchanges. The IEEE calls for standards for governance and architecture to enable these technologies to be used. Apart from protecting privacy, technical and governance standards are needed to allow interoperability between systems across borders.

Organisations such as the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund have been writing about and working on this in the context of CBDCs so perhaps the IEEE will get their wish!