Interoperability is everywhere.

Consider the 3.5mm headphone jack — the part of your headphones that you plug into your iPod or computer. It’s been the standard for decades, and is compatible with almost any device that plays music. In fact, if you’ve bought headphones at any point during the past half-century, you probably didn’t even question if they would work with your iPod or other music device. When interoperability is done well, you don’t notice it. It’s unobtrusive, stealthy: an essential part of your experience that doesn’t even cross your mind.

In fact, we often take interoperability for granted. So when an interoperability standard is disrupted, it’s a rather jarring feeling. Take Apple’s decision to remove the iPhone’s 3.5mm headphone jack. This deviation from the industry standard left many Apple fans furious — they practically followed the 5 stages of grief. It took me many frustrated months after (angrily) buying the new iPhone to capitulate and buy bluetooth headphones.

In short, we can see that interoperability isn’t just a cherry on top of a product. Its part of purposeful design. As exemplified by the 3.5mm headphone jack, interoperability is an integral factor in enabling widespread adoption.

How does this relate to Cryptocurrency?

Currently, blockchains are not interoperable. In fact, they’re quite siloed, which leads to a host of issues including forced single-ledger dependency and the inability to communicate and interact between other blockchains.

However, there are countless use cases that demand interoperability. What if your local credit union uses a private blockchain, but wants to integrate with a platform like Stellar for cross-border money transfer? What if dozens of European countries want to exchange data between their own unique blockchains? What if a private company, like Walmart or Amazon, create their own blockchain-based supply chain management solution, but need to interact with another DLT protocol like VeChain or Ambrosus? If we want to see mass adoption of blockchain technology, interoperability is an inevitable step toward that goal. The question then is who’s going to do that well? Who will author the 3.5mm headphone jack of blockchain technology, thereby defining how we interact with blockchain for years to come?

Quant Network

We introduce Overledger by Quant Network, an operating system that runs as a layer over existing blockchains, and enables the development of MAPPS: decentralized applications that utilize multiple blockchains simultaneously. These multi-chain applications offer developers the ability to use different blockchains for different segments of an application. For example, a MAPP could use the Ethereum blockchain for data storage while employing Bitcoin for value transfer. This alone is a very powerful idea — applications can harness the unique strengths of different blockchains while avoiding their weaknesses.

Furthermore, Quant’s MAPPs are blockchain agnostic, meaning they are abstracted from the underlying blockchain. MAPP programmers only need to be familiar with Overledger’s blockchain program interface in order to incorporate any of its supported blockchains. This eliminates the need for developers to learn multiple programming languages; for example, an Ethereum-based MAPP will require no knowledge of Solidity, Ethereum’s native programming language.

This takes us to Overledger’s most remarkable value proposition: any blockchain used in a MAPP can be easily swapped for another. If the Ethereum network slows down or becomes prohibitively expensive, an Ethereum-based MAPP could effortlessly migrate to EOS or a private blockchain. Returning to the example of the headphone jack, we can draw an analogy: headphones are to MP3 players as MAPPS are to blockchains. What happens if your MP3 player breaks? You simply plug your headphones into a new MP3 player. Similarly, Overledger allows you to swap between different blockchains to cater the needs of your MAPP.

Thus, not only does Quant make interoperability possible—it makes blockchain easy. For organizations of any size looking to implement distributed ledger technology, Quant will allow them to quickly and easily create modular, highly adaptable applications.

The Long Game

Quant’s vision isn’t one for tomorrow, or next year. It’s a vision of the future when the entire world runs on blockchain. To make that vision a reality, Quant is creating a seamless interoperability standard that can be applied to any decentralized application. They understand that mass adoption requires intuitive and flexible products, and Quant’s MAPPs are just that. We believe that Quant’s Overledger — just like the 3.5mm headphone jack or other software frameworks — is an elegant solution that will define blockchain for years to come.

This is the second article we’ve written about Quant Network. For a more comprehensive look, take a look at our previous article here, or visit the Quant website at https://www.quant.network/