Power of Contracts

Many organizations are looking to transform their business processes through a class of multi-party distributed applications where tokenized value is exchanged point-to-point across a shared medium platform. Unfortunately, the platform is usually picked first and then business processes are modeled around technical implementations that may or may not meet business needs – requiring those processes to be adjusted so that they can be mapped onto the chosen platform. Over time this disconnect leads to tremendous inefficiencies because core business is compromised to suit the needs of a technology.

In contrast, a ‘business first’ approach shifts the focus to describing business processes in a neutral way, a way that is not limited to individual platform options and eliminates any sort of hard dependencies so that organizations have freedom of choice. The IWA is enabling this shift towards a business first approach by developing a clear definition and scope of the token concept including use cases, taxonomy, and terminology, and a specification neutral to underlying technology.

The Token Taxonomy Framework (TTF) enables organizations to describe shared value as tokens that can be represented on any sort of shared medium for the exchange of value point-to-point. As part of the TTF token definition process, low-level agreements on how tokenized value is represented include a set of programmatic ‘hooks’, or placeholders, that provide a set of standard interfaces to the multi-party contracts or agreements that will be written over those tokens. The InterWork Framework will set the next level of IWA standards, standards that allow those contracts to be composed from a palette of agreed-to contractual clauses that match the placeholders set out in the token definition.

The first release of the InterWork Framework has not yet been released.