Sally Xue Gong, Head of the Ontology US operations, speaking at IEEE

Last week, the 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (IEEE-NIST) Global Blockchain Summit was hosted in Washington D.C., which provided overview talks on the evolution of blockchain technologies and the conversations

surrounding them. Hosting technical and thorough discussions with developers and regulators, the conference highlighted the maturation of the technology as it moves away from speculation into the deployment phase.

Ontology’s partner and head of the US branch, Sally Xue Gong, spoke on a panel which gave attendees the pulse of where the blockchain industry is now in terms of innovation, entrepreneurship, and support for its startup ecosystem. She was joined by: Jon E. Wright, Director at D.C.-based law firm; Sterne Kessler; Ted Waz CEO at The Opinion Economy; and Giles Fedak, CEO and Co-Founder of iExec.

Sally discussed how public blockchain infrastructure should not be purely decentralized. Instead, she suggests using a decentralized approach to combine decentralized trust sources into a new process platform. Sally also explained how cryptography is not the only problem standing in between on- and off-chain communications. The barrier between the two ecosystems encompasses legal systems, economic mechanisms, and all of the administrative systems in different countries, including different areas with different language system. The huge amount of data exchange behind these processes and integrating all of this is one of the key challenges for blockchain to move towards mainstream infrastructure in the next phase.

Ontology is solving both trust collaboration and performance issues that currently exist at infrastructure level by helping companies build their own private or public blockchains specifically tailored to different government standards, consensus rules, and permission policies. Ontology’s suite of applications, modules, and protocols products include a distributed data exchange framework, identity management, decentralized smart contracts, and reputation management via scores. These individualized modules together create a platform for trust and collaboration where businesses interoperate across borders, each abiding by their own legal regulations and hurdles.

Ontology is a multi-chain network which includes complete distributed ledgers and smart contract systems. Unlike other public blockchain projects, Ontology has two platforms and two roadmaps: a high-performance public blockchains platform and a distributed trust collaboration platform. Sally mentioned, only these two platforms working together as an integrated one can support both developers and companies to build dApps to solve real-world business problems across borders.