Standards Developing Organisations
and National Mirror Committees
of Blockchain and DLT Standards
What is Standardisation about?
Standardisation is defined as the activity of establishing, in relation to actual or potential problems, provisions for common and repeatable use, aimed at achieving the optimum degree of order in a given context. It is a strategic tool for agreeing terminology, methods, requirements, characteristics, etc. in a given field to make a product, process or service fit for purpose.
Standardisation can:
- promote innovative outcomes by agreeing on common product requirements, like interoperability, quality and/or safety, and providing guidelines on how to achieve them;
- encourage relevant stakeholders from different countries and contexts to participate and combine their efforts to create a common language.
The outcome of the standardisation development is a document, which delivers rules, guidelines, or characteristics for activities or their results. In general, stakeholders (consumers, businesses, policy makers, researchers and innovators, etc.) can expect many positive aspects from these results and their application, including: enhance the safety of products, enable manufacturers to comply with European legislation, promote interoperability, facilitate trade, support environmental sustainability and reflect the outcome of research and development.
How to Participate – National Mirror Committees
Complementing the Repository, BlockStand has completed a Mapping of National Mirror Committees. This Database has been developed to guide European experts wishing to participate in blockchain standardisation through their National Standardisation Bodies (NSBs). The following table has been created, providing:
- The number and title of the relevant National Mirror Committee for blockchain
- Direct links to the corrisponding websites
- Additional information to foster participation and for inquiries
This addition strengthens the Facility’s role as a practical support tool for expert enagagement at national level, reinforcing Europe’s strategic presence in blockchain standardisation activities. Download the mapping as an Excel file through the button or browse through the list below!
Standards Developing Organisations and Further information
CEN and CENELEC consist of the national standards organisations of the EU and EFTA (European Free Trade Association) countries, plus those applying for membership, bringing together 34 National Standardisation Bodies.
Participation in CEN and CENELEC standardisation work is based on the national delegation principle. Technical Committees are composed of CEN and CENELEC representatives and are open to all CEN/CENELEC national members, on the basis of only one joint delegation per country, with representatives appointed by the CEN/CENELEC members in that country. In the definition of their delegations, the CEN/CENELEC national members shall ensure that due account is taken of all the interests which are affected by the work. In contrast, ETSI members are directly companies, institutes and organisations and the principle of delegation does not apply. In order to participate in CEN/CENELEC standardisation activities at European level, the interested stakeholder must be a member of the National Mirror Committee (NMC) of the relevant TC.
CEN/CENELEC JTC 19 – Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies. CEN/CLC JTC 19 focuses on the European requirements for distributed ledger technologies and continues to identify and possibly adopt standards already available or under development in other SDOs (in particular ISO/TC 307) that could support the EU Digital Single Market and/or EC Directives/Regulations. CEN/CLC JTC 19 addresses the development of standards to support electronic identification in the context of the revision of the rules on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS Regulation).
CEN/CENELEC SFEM – Sector Forum Energy Management & Energy Transition. In April 2021 SFEM has set up a focus group for Blockchain and DLT which brings together stakeholders coming from the energy sector as well as from academic and research bodies. This focus group has published in April 2023 a Final Report with roadmap and recommendations towards EC and CEN/CENELC BTs based on a in dept mapping of the actual challenges and activities in the field of DLT4Energy.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization operating in the field of information and communications. ETSI supports the development and testing of global technical standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services.
ETSI TC ESI – Electronic Signatures and Trust Infrastructures. ESI deals with digital signatures and related trust services. ESI covers the format of digital signatures, as well as procedures and policies for creation and validation policy, security and technical requirements for trust service providers (TSP) such as certification authorities, time-stamping authorities, TSP providing remote signature creation or validation functions, registered e-delivery providers, and long-term data preservation providers. We address Trusted Lists that enhance the confidence of parties relying on certificates or other services related to digital signatures by indicating whether a given TSP was operating under the approval of any recognised scheme. TC ESI aims at supporting the eIDAS Regulation as well as the general requirements of the international community to provide trust and confidence in electronic transactions.
ETSI ISG IPE – IPv6 Enhanced Innovation. IPE is the Industry Specification Group which studies how IPv6 could be applied to blockchain technology.
ETSI ISG PDL – Industry Specification Group Permissioned Distributed Ledgers. PDL is committed to analyse and provide the foundations for the operation of permissioned distributed ledgers, with the ultimate purpose of creating an open ecosystem of industrial solutions to be deployed by different sectors, fostering the application of these technologies, and therefore contributing to consolidating the trust and dependability on information technologies supported by global, open telecommunications networks. The ISG PDL incorporates research and new development results in the field as they become available, especially in aspects related to smart contracts, interoperability among ledgers, data management, and trust and reputation support.
The International Organization for Standardization is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
ISO/TC 307 – Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies. ISO/TC 307 was established in April 2017 to standardise the blockchain concept and the mechanism to support it. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies has wide global outreach and involves majority of the EU Member States works with reference architecture, taxonomy and ontology, cybersecurity, identity, use-cases, interoperability and other aspects of blockchain standardisation.
ISO/TC 154 – Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration. TC 154 focuses on International standardisation and registration of business, and administration processes and supporting data used for information interchange between and within individual organisations and support for standardisation activities in the field of industrial data.
ISO/TC 154/JWG 9 – ISO/UNECE joint working group for information exchange of supply chain aligned to UN/CEFACT semantics – is working on data interchange processes of blockchain based negotiable maritime bill of lading related to e-Commerce platform and Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 – Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information. SC 29 is responsible for the Standardisation in the field of efficient coding of digital representations of images, audio and moving pictures, efficient coding of other digital information, and Digital information support WG 3 – MPEG Systems, developed a standard on Smart contracts for media.
The International Electrotechnical Commission is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies.
IEC SyC Smart Energy – Its WG 8 Distributed energy trading infrastructure has in its work of programme links with blockchain/DLT, Extension of the SGAM to include Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT-SGAM-Reference Architecture Model) and Archetypes of DLT-based business models for the energy sector.
IEEE, pronounced “eye-triple-E,” stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE’s members are engineers and technologists from around the globe, and the organization fosters technological innovation and excellence through publications, conferences, and standards.
IEEE Computer Society Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers (BDL) Standards Committee focuses on developing standards for blockchain-based digital asset management, digital asset classification, a digital asset exchange model, blockchain identity key management and on a digital identity system framework. Furthermore, the WG develops a family of blockchain standards, address interoperability of blockchains, naming, cross-chain transaction consistency as well as data authentication and communication.
IEEE Consumer Technology Society Blockchain Standards Committee (CTS/BSC) is focused on “Standardising the decentralised world” from a consumer perspective. The scope of the Standards Committee is to develop and maintain standards, recommended practices and guides for blockchain technologies and applications, especially from the consumers’ perspective, using an open and accredited process, and to advocate them on a global basis.
The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies.
ITU/FG Distributed Ledger Technology. DLT refers the processes and related technologies that enable nodes in a network to securely propose, validate and record state changes (or updates) to a synchronised ledger that is distributed across the network’s nodes.
The ITU-T Focus Group on Application of Distributed Ledger Technology (FG DLT) was established in May 2017:
- to identify and analyse DLT-based applications and services;
- to draw up best practices and guidance which support the implementation of those applications and services on a global scale; and
- to propose a way forward for related standardisation work in ITU-T Study Groups.
The ITU-T Focus Group on Application of Distributed Ledger Technology (FG-DLT) concluded its work on 1 August 2019 and produced a number of deliverables, which were transferred to ITU-T Study Groups 16 (Multimedia) and 17 (Security).
The W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium, is an international community that develops and promotes open web standards. Their mission is to lead the web to its full potential by creating technical specifications and guidelines for various web technologies, including accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security.
W3C: its Blockchain Community Group is studying and evaluating technologies related to blockchain and use-cases such as interbank communications. Its work is complemented by a group on Blockchain and Decentralised Apps and one on Digital Assets.
The mission of the Decentralised Identifier Working Group is two-fold. First, it will maintain the Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) specification and related Working Group Notes. Second, it will seek consensus around the best way to achieve effective interoperability through common requirements, algorithms, architectural options, and various considerations for the DID resolution and DID URL dereferencing processes.
The Credential Community Group which has developed key standards for SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity) including Decentralised Identifiers (DID) Data model and Syntax and Verifiable Claims Use Cases and Data Model.
The Internet Engineering Task Force is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite. It has no formal membership roster or requirements and all its participants are volunteers.
IRTF Internet Research Task Force – IRTF promotes research of importance to the evolution of the Internet by creating focused, long-term Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology.
The Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG) aims to provide for the research and engineering community, both an open forum to discuss the Internet centralisation phenomena and associated potential threats, and a platform to facilitate the coordination of efforts in identifying the causes of observed consolidations and the mitigation solutions.
DINRG‘s main objectives include the investigation of the root causes of Internet centralisation, and articulation of the impacts of the market economy, architecture and protocol designs, as well as government regulations; measurement of the Internet centralisation and the consequential societal impacts; characterisation and assessment of observed Internet centralisation; development of a common terminology and understanding of (de-)centralisation; interaction with the broader research community to explore new research topics and technical solutions for decentralised system and application development; documentation of the outcome from the above efforts via different means (e.g., research papers and RFCs) as inputs to the broader conversation around centralisation; and facilitation of discussions between researchers, organisations and individuals involved in Internet standards and regulations.
The EEA Community Projects, formerly known as the Ethereum OASIS Open Project, is the hub for open source-based standards development in the Ethereum industry. It aims to facilitate Ethereum’s longevity, interoperability, and ease of integration and intends to develop documentation and shared test suites that facilitate new features and enhancements to the Ethereum protocol. The projects seek to address interoperability of implementations. EEA projects include Ethereum projects like the Baseline Protocol and JSON-RPC API documentation under its stewardship.
The Baseline Protocol OASIS Open Project combines advances in cryptography, messaging, and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet.
Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC) is essentially a set of technical documents containing guidelines on developing a smart contract. They define a specific set of functions for each token type and facilitate the interaction between applications and smart contracts.
The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) has developed two White Papers on Blockchain and a Sectoral Use Case paper. The first White Paper provides an overview of the base principles of Distributed Ledger Technology; the second explores the needs for standardisation in this area and concludes a strong need for semantic data standards in order to ensure clear understanding between the issuer of information on a Blockchain and all users of that data.
The UN/CEFACT Core Component Library can cover the data needs in trade transactions. The final UN/CEFACT Blockchain paper explores the specific needs of each sector (Maritime Transport, Supply Chain, Agriculture, etc.) and provides a number of use cases.
The European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) has been set up on 10 April 2018 following the agreement of 28 European countries which signed a joint declaration to cooperate in the establishment of a European blockchain services infrastructure (EBSI) that will support the delivery of cross-border public services, through interoperability and open interfaces and with the highest standards of security.
Today the EBP includes all EU Member States, Norway and Liechtenstein. In the short-term EBSI is addressing pending capabilities such as selective disclosure of information contained in a verifiable credential by using techniques such as BBS+ signatures represented in a JSON-LD structure. Other topic that will be faced in EBSI is the implementation of JAdES signatures to permit the verification of verifiable credentials and presentations in a more interoperable way.
In analysing existing standardisation activities, it’s important to distinguish between three main categories of documents:
- De jure standards: developed and published by officially recognised standardisation bodies such as ISO, IEC, ITU at the international level or CEN, CENELEC, ETSI at the European level;
- Recognised de facto standards: developed by widely recognised organisations in the industry that, while not formal standardisation bodies, follow open and consensual processes and meet the criteria of EU Regulation 1025/2012 for the identification of ICT technical specifications. Examples include standards from W3C, IETF, IEEE, OASIS;
- Industry specifications: technical documents developed by trade associations, industry consortia, or specific projects. These documents typically have a more limited consensus base and may not follow formal standardisation processes. Examples include specifications from INATBA or EBSI.
