When you build a piece of heavy machinery like, say, a bulldozer, standards are of immediate and obvious importance. Without standards, the same nuts and bolts could not be used to build different machines, which leads to cost overruns and compliance issues.

The matter is a lot less clear, though, when it comes to emerging technologies such as distributed-ledger technologies (DLT). Hell, the industry can’t even standardize around the technology’s name—is it DLT or blockchain, which is