A decade in the making, we have published an ISO standard for blockchain interoperability.
This is a milestone I've been working towards since 2015, Remitt was founded with the conviction that blockchains could transform financial services but only if the industry solved interoperability and harmonised around global standards. Without that, blockchain would remain fragmented, siloed, and locked out of mainstream institutional adoption.
In April 2016, we published what was the world's first proposal for a blockchain standard (https://www.remitt.com/blog/2016/04/28/world-first-standard-for-blockchains/) a bold move at a time when the industry was still largely focused on proofs of concept and competing protocol narratives, not standardisation.
The idea was simple but ambitious: if blockchains were going to serve global markets, they needed a common framework that transcended any single protocol or vendor.
Central to this thinking from the very beginning was the concept of a multi-gateway architecture, leveraging the know-how of 20 years of experience in cybersecurity to frame the principle that interoperability shouldn't depend on a single bridge or point-to-point connection, but on a layered gateway model that could abstract away the differences between underlying DLTs and connect them through a common interface. This was the architectural foundation of what would become Overledger, and it was also the design philosophy we brought to the standards process.
The belief was that a viable international standard for blockchain interoperability had to be protocol-agnostic and gateway-driven, enabling any DLT to communicate with any other DLT (any-to-any) and with existing networks, without requiring those ledgers to change how they operate. The standard and the technology were born from the same insight.
That same year, I worked closely with the team from @standardsaus (Standards Australia), who had the foresight in 2015 to champion the initiative at the international level. Together, we pushed for ISO to establish a dedicated Technical Committee for blockchain and not to be absorbed into an existing committee, but to stand on its own as a recognition that this technology warranted its own global standards programme. The industry demand was there, the use cases were multiplying, and the fragmentation was becoming a real barrier.
In September 2016, the New Work Item Proposal (NWIP) received global approval, and ISO formally gave the green light to establish a new Technical Committee (https://www.remitt.com/blog/2016/09/19/green-light-for-blockchain-standards/). TC 307 — Blockchain and Electronic Distributed Ledger Technologies — was born (http://www.remitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ISO-TSP-258-Blockchain-and-Electronic-Distributed-Ledger-Technologies.pdf). The inaugural meeting was held in Sydney in April 2017, and from that moment the real work began.
As the standards work progressed internationally, the mission at Remitt was evolving too. What started as an effort to use blockchains for financial services and solve interoperability grew into something far larger, a full enterprise infrastructure platform for connecting any blockchain to any network. Remitt became Quant, and we built Overledger, the world's first blockchain operating system to deliver on that original vision. The multi-gateway architecture that informed the standards thinking became the core of Overledger's design: a technology layer that sits above all blockchains, providing institutions with a single integration point to access any DLT, any network, and any existing system. The interoperability challenge that drove the standards work was the same challenge we set out to solve commercially and the two efforts reinforced each other throughout.
For close to a decade since TC 307's formation, subject matter experts across the world have contributed their time and expertise to Working Group 7 — Interoperability is the committee I chair.
International standards are not built quickly they are built through consensus, technical debate, and relentless refinement. The same methodology and rigour that created the Internet, through publishing standards. The result is a published international standard for blockchain interoperability.
🔗 https://www.iso.org/standard/82098.html
A huge thank you to @isostandards as the international standards developing organisation, to the team at @standardsaus who started the initiative in 2015 and worked tirelessly to get TC 307 approved and established globally, and to every subject matter expert who contributed to Working Group 7 over the years. This would not exist without that collective effort.
From a blog post proposing the world's first blockchain standard in 2016, to a published ISO standard in 2026 and from Remitt to Quant, from an architectural concept of multi-gateway interoperability to Overledger and a global standard, this has been a decade-long journey of building both the standards and the technology to make blockchain interoperability a reality for institutions worldwide.
There is still much more work ahead. More standards to develop, more to evolve, and more to build. But today, we mark a significant milestone.
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