In 1973 Vint Cerf invented the protocol that rules them all: TCP/IP. Most people have never heard of it. But it describes the fundamental architecture of the internet, and it made possible Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, e-mail, FTP, 3G/4G — as well as all of the inventions built upon those inventions.

So we had multiple networks, in his formulation, all of them packet-switched, but with different characteristics. Some were larger, some went faster, some had packets that got lost, some didn’t. So the question is how can you make all the computers on each of those various networks think they are part of one common network — despite all these variations and diversity. That was the internet problem.

Sound familiar? Distributed ledger technologies currently face the same problem of running in isolated silo’s. How can you connect all these different blockchains, regardless of what consensus mechanism they use, whether they are permissioned (Hyperledger, Quorum, Corda etc) or permissionless (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple etc), fast or slow, blockchain or DAG (like IOTA) or any future blockchains so that they are part of one common network despite all the variations and diversity?

Wired: So from the beginning, people, including yourself, had a vision of where the internet was going to go. Are you surprised, though, that at this point the IP protocol seems to beat almost anything it comes up against? Cerf: I’m not surprised at all because we designed it to do that. This was very conscious. Something we did right at the very beginning, when we were writing the specifications, we wanted to make this a future-proof protocol. And so the tactic that we used to achieve that was to say that the protocol did not know how — the packets of the internet protocol layer didn’t know how they were being carried. And they didn’t care whether it was a satellite link or mobile radio link or an optical fiber or something else. We were very, very careful to isolate that protocol layer from any detailed knowledge of how it was being carried. Plainly, the software had to know how to inject it into a radio link, or inject it into an optical fiber, or inject it into a satellite connection. But the basic protocol didn’t know how that worked. And the other thing that we did was to make sure that the network didn’t know what the packets had in them. We didn’t encrypt them to prevent it from knowing — we just didn’t make it have to know anything. It’s just a bag of bits as far as the net was concerned. We were very successful in these two design features, because every time a new kind of communications technology came along, like frame relay or asynchronous transfer mode or passive optical networking or mobile radio‚ all of these different ways of communicating could carry internet packets. We would hear people saying, ‘The internet will be replaced by X25,’ or ‘The internet will be replaced by frame relay,’ or ‘The internet will be replaced by APM,’ or ‘The internet will be replaced by add-and-drop multiplexers.’ Of course, the answer is, ‘No, it won’t.’ It just runs on top of everything. And that was by design. I’m actually very proud of the fact that we thought of that and carefully designed that capability into the system.

This is the approach Quant have taken with their Blockchain OS, Overledger to solve Blockchain interoperability. Compared to other Interoperability platforms that are trying to achieve interoperability at the transaction layer by connecting two blockchains via another blockchain, these will be ultimately be made redundant once faster methods are released. Overledger is designed to be future proof by isolating the layers so they don’t care which blockchain is being used, what consensus method etc, each layer is only interested with the data within that same layer. Just as the Internet wasn’t replaced by X25, frame relay, APM etc, Overledger is designed to be future proof as it just runs on top of the Blockchains rather than being a blockchain itself. So, if a new blockchain technology comes out that is capable of 100,000 TPS then it can easily be integrated as Overledger just runs on top of it.

Let’s Dive a bit deeper into the different Layers of Overledger:

Transaction Layer:

This layer stores transactions that are appended, stored or queued on the ledgers. All transactions executed in a specific blockchain are only valid for that ledger. A bitcoin transaction is not valid on the Ethereum network for example and even when some ledgers share the same protocol such as Ethereum’s Main net and Test Net, a transaction on the Ethereum Test Net is not valid on the Ethereum Main Net. Therefore, this layer is represented by different and isolated ledgers and is represented in the image below with each being a different colour.

This layer includes Thin Clients, Full Nodes, and all the operations needed to reach consensus in different blockchain domains to append the transaction to the ledger.