Internet Engineering Task Force designs a domain name system for digital currency transfers

Rage Review : Earlier this month, Interledger made its first real payment and has licensed some small operators to merge into neutral protocols. Digital currency engineers are working on a Domain Name System (DNS) style protocol to allow funds to be shared across networks and to enable digital asset transfers between different accounts on different networks. At the meeting held by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) this week, everyone was also very interested in this concept.

Translation: Nicole

Kieren McCarthy uses familiar concepts to connect digital currency networks.

Cryptocurrency engineers are working on a Domain Name System (DNS)-style protocol to allow funds to be shared across networks.

The idea of ​​digital currencies — and blockchain in particular — has become extremely popular in recent years, but there are many competing networks that don’t talk to each other: the automated clearing houses used by banks, the networks of credit card companies, blockchains, and so on.

The scientists behind Interledger are going to change all that, borrowing from DNS and using DNS-style naming conventions to authenticate different accounts.

They have developed a set of protocols that are primarily focused on transferring digital assets between different accounts on different networks - just as TCP/IP (a set of communication protocols used for the Internet) provides a common communication language for data transfer. But they do not focus on payment and built-in security issues.

The address part of the protocol is probably very familiar to everyone: "us.wf.bob" is an example. "us.wf" is the ledger (we would guess Wells Fargo Bank in the US), and "bob" is the account number. You also have a subledger just like you have a subdomain - "us.wf.bob.car." is an example.

The rest is based on a simple packet format, just like DNS.

Address: "us.wf.bob"

Quantity: "1023.20"

Expires: "2016-07-06T09:00:10Z"

Condition: "cc:0:3:4a7DEpj8f9..."

The Interledger team sees the well-known and time-tested concept of routing tables as a way to direct different networks and different ledgers to have different conversion rates for one currency to another.

Just like DNS packets, the protocol accepts the concept of time-based expiration dates, which prevents packets (money) from being lost or retransmitted if the information is not received.

It's a new and novel concept, and it was brought to a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) this week as a proposal (PDF) for Internet engineers to see if it needs to be developed.

Interledger, which conducted its first real payment earlier this month, has licensed a number of smaller operators to merge into the neutral protocol, and said interest generally came from “central banks, payment service providers, blockchain companies and protocol platform developers,” none of which have yet to be named.

The goal is to put the project under the supervision of a non-profit foundation and provide a royalty-free protocol. The specifications and code are on GitHub, a website that stores a lot of other information and recent presentations.

People at the IETF are very interested in the concept, but still a little skeptical, which is not surprising, given that the protocol hopes to enable the exchange of potentially tens of millions of dollars electronically.