# Comparing Blockchain Standards and Recommendations
## 1 Introduction  
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) has many use cases throughout various economic sectors and even for individual beings, as shown by the plethora of use cases in [1]. Nevertheless, despite the global possibilities, blockchains are not yet widely used in our everyday lives. One of the reasons for this is the lack of standardization [2; 3; 4]. There are still no standards catering to the mass implementation of blockchain and the situation must change to ensure a sustained survival of the DLT ecosystem as a major part of modern technology. In this regard, several industry alliances and standardization authorities are now working together to create global DLT and blockchain standards. Rating agency Moody's [5] experts believe that standardization will accelerate the process of technology implementation, reduce transaction costs, level out regulatory risks, improve the interoperability of systems, and improve the quality of interaction between market participants, as well as it will increase the attractiveness of securing assets on a blockchain. According to a forecast by researchers at MarketsandMarkets, the market of blockchain IoT will reach up to USD 113.1 million with an average annual growth rate of 92.92% over a period of 5 years by 2024 [6]. While these numbers are focused on just one single field of application, the Internet of Things, there are various additional sectors where blockchains and the distributed ledger technology can be utilized, suggesting a number that is higher by a multifold for the entirety of the technology. The impact of blockchains on the generation of value in different industries is outlined in [7]. Standardization of blockchain technology is an important step towards a common concept, interoperability, scaling, auditing and possible further regulation of the technology. The overall lack of standardization and clarity is considered as an obstacle to the adoption of the technology [3]. Besides the sometimes negatively afflicted image of blockchains stemming from cyber crime, its compatibility to existing laws and regulations, as well as internal policies is hard to assess without internationally and universally valid standardization which can be used for orientation. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:  
* We give an overview on existing (final) standardization efforts concerning blockchain and digital ledger techniques. * Furthermore, we provide a set of criteria for comparing these standards and recommendations aimed at blockchains and related technologies that can be used in future work. * Existing standards and publications of major standardisation organisations are compared using these criteria in order to provide a comprehensive, yet fast to read, overview on standardisation activities in this field. * We discuss dependencies of the selected publications to other standardization work. These interconnections can reveal valuable information about the content. This paper is organized in the following way:  
* Section 2 explains related concepts and the importance of standardization in IT. * Section 3 lists the criteria we used to compare the source material and our selection process. * Section 4 provides an overview of the selected source material. * Section 5 compares the standards according to our criteria and highlights interconnections to other standards. * Section 6 is used to explain our results and contains concluding thoughts. * Section 7 is a discussion on further points of relevancy. We are convinced that such a comparison is of great value for the blockchain community, as it provides an overview of a topic that is usually not the center of attention. As mentioned in Section 2.1, there was only limited research on the topic in the past and since then many new developments emerged, which are still unaccounted for. Additionally, to our knowledge we provide the first comparison that goes beyond enumerating bodies of standardization and their working groups on blockchain.