Technical standards for blockchain and digital assets, as in any new technology, are fundamental to ensure safety, reliability, and further innovation. Technical standards are fundamental for all use cases and sectors in which this technology is being adopted.

They establish common guidelines, definitions, and rules through technical criteria, specifications, methodologies, and practices which serve to ensure adequate functionality. Interoperability, trust, and ease of use are necessary for stakeholders to work together and scale. Collaboration is fundamental for the growth of an industry, in ways that will ultimately lead to widespread acceptance of formalized rules and regulations. GSMI provides a landscape of technical standards developments for blockchain and digital assets, alongside a commentary on their importance.

The Technical Standards Landscape, which includes over 100 global bodies and their roles to advance technical standards in the space, is meant to facilitate ways for users to identify relevant standards to adhere to, as well as ways to align with other stakeholders. Industry standards organizations can also use this landscape to identify gaps, opportunities, and areas for further alignment. This landscape allows users to compare across standards bodies based on their purpose and proposed outcome, while also allowing for self-identification based on their topics and industries of focus. Standards in the space are marked according to their proposed outcome, which may be technical standards and specifications, regulatory compliance, or best practices and governance. The standards bodies are also categorized by their main function as global or regional standards setters or associations, and whether they may have a regulatory affiliation. This year we also added national standards bodies acting as representative delegations at the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) Technical Committee 307 (ISO/TC 307), which focuses on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. This repository of technical standards bodies is meant to provide an objective overview of the state of standards developments today for blockchain and digital assets, with no vested interests from any particular organization.

The commentary on technical standards also highlights their function and importance for the technology, providing an overview of the different organizations involved in standards setting. It also provides an assessment of the processes to approve a globally recognized standard, as well as the journey that companies and organizations seeking to comply with that standard must follow. Ultimately, standards are also a tool for competitiveness and long term growth, as well as ethical maturity – hence this commentary also provides an ethical maturity model approach that is tied to standards adherence.

Finally, Technical Standards are fundamental for governance, especially as decentralized governance structures arise enabled by blockchain technology. Below we also provide a commentary on standards as they relate to a value chain of governance. In this context, technical standards are also enabling overarching foundational use cases that are key for success across industries and sectors: tokenization, identity verification, business continuity, and resource management.