Back in the days, everyone were used to see and use the massive yellow book called ' Yellow Pages'. They are simply a directory for businesses organized by category rather than alphabetically.
When the internet became popular, people started shifting from offline books to online directories. And this was especially true when more businesses made their way to the internet for the first time.
Yahoo! was the giant that take advantage of this. The company created the earliest and popular internet directory for businesses.
HACERA that specializes in computer and blockchain, wants to bring a catalogue-like platform of blockchain and blockchain-based businesses. To do this, the company launched the HACERA Network Registry, with a project called 'Unbound Registry'.
According to its mission statement, its a "decentralized cross-blockchain registry that brings permissioned and permissionless blockchains together through a directory of blockchain networks."
This is to create a platform that creates interoperability across different blockchains, allowing them to interact and transact regardless of specific protocols.
Coincides with the registry's official launch, is IBM in becoming one of the founding members.
"As the number of blockchain consortiums, networks and applications continues to grow we need a means to list them and make them known to the world, in order to unleash the power of blockchain." said Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s Vice President Blockchain Technologies.
"The Unbounded Registry, built on blockchain technology, provides a decentralized means to register, look up, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions, built to interoperate with all of today’s popular distributed ledger technologies."
Unbounded Registry provides several key capabilities that addressed these common problems:
- Reserved naming for networks, applications and consortiums.
- The discoverability of blockchain networks and applications.
- A catalogue of domain-specific functions and services.
- An independent, open and shared blockchain backed platform to help with bootstrapping, launching and growing communities.
Here is where Cuomo characterizes the project as some kind of "Yellow Pages" of the blockchain.
HACERA's CEO Jonathan Levi said that blockchains being established are in risk being isolated because people simply can’t find them. The aim for the project, is to make those networks visible to the world.
Levi said the the registry is open for everyone. Blockchain projects for example, can create their own information pages, which must first be verified by HACERA before adding it to the registry. At the beginning, there are already more than 70 networks in the registry, and HACERA hopes this is just the beginning.
Levi has a broader vision for the network which is beyond pure discoverability. He hopes that eventually, it can provide the means to share data through the registry.
According to Jerry Cuomo, in order for a blockchain to grow, it needs a way to register, lookup, join and transact across a variety of blockchain solutions. And this project that acts like the Yellow Pages of blockchain, is enabling that, making all of those things possible.
This is the kind of underlying infrastructure that blockchain projects need to expand as a technology, and Cuomo certainly acknowledges this.
"We realized from the start that you cannot do blockchain on your own; you need a vibrant community and ecosystem of like-minded innovators who share the vision of helping to transform the way companies conduct business in the global economy," he said.
Early participants to the project besides IBM, include Microsoft, Hitachi, Huawei, SAP and Oracle.
The 'Unbound Registry' supports projects based on major digital ledger communities including Hyperledger, Quorum, Cosmos, Ethereum and Corda. The HACERA Network Registry is built on Hyperledger Fabric, and the code is open source.