The world-renowned British Standards Institute is starting to put together a standard for ICOs. The idea being that by providing firm guidelines and best practice, it will be easier to determine whether an ICO is worth investing in.
The news was revealed at an event called Bringing the Blockchain into the Mainstream in London this week. Stephen Wilson, a senior consultant at the BSI, announced that the organisation was starting to develop a standard for ICOs. It is expected to take two years. The process is quite standardised itself: after initial researches, the BSI sets up an “expert group” which examines the subject and recommends what to do in an initial report which then is consulted on by stakeholders and the public, then the results of this are fed into a revision process and the standard is published.
Stephen Wilson
The BSI was the first national standards institution, established in 1901 and internationally highly-regarded – ISO 9001 the quality management systems standard, is now recognized as the world's most successful standard having been adopted by more than one million organisations in 178 countries.
The standard for ICOs is to be called PAS 19688. PAS stands for Publicly Available Specification. It is intended to set an agenda for a business sector and highlight good practice. There are a number of features to this – firstly it is voluntary, but with the BSI (and possibly its international big brother the ISO) behind it, the standard is likely to have weight. If you were considering putting money into a token sale, and one ICO had adhered to a British Standard, and the other hadn’t, which would you feel was safer? It is also likely that this will be the first standard for ICOs, and other jurisdictions will simply adopt it if it works reasonably well, thus becoming an international standard.
Stephen Wilson said that standards speed up development and encourage investment. He pointed to the BSI’s Smart Cities standards which were published in 2015 and have helped innovators develop integrated approaches to the issues involved. He said, “It is possible for the industry to make standards mandatory, for example if insurers agree that you will only get cover if you adhere to the PAS. Standards can also become the basis of regulation, for example by the FCA.”
The event was sponsored by QRC Group, who are developing an ecosystem of regulatory technologies to make a blockchain powered future possible by bridging the gap between the crypto world, fiat currencies and conventional regulation. Warren Paull, Director QRC UK Services said, “We are here on a mission to create a platform of RegTech [Regulatory Technology] infrastructure to allow people to have an easy and safe access to blockchain products and really bring blockchain into the mainstream.”
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