Influential blockchain enthusiasts, including those from IBM, JPMorgan, the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger, will meet to consider a possible governing organisation to boost the progress of the technology.

The meeting will be held on 24 August in the Canadian township Lake of Bays, in the summer residence of Don Tapscott, who co-authored the popular book Blockchain Revolution and who will host the event together with his son Alex. According to Mr Tapscott, the blockchain industry needs a self-regulation body to develop professional standards and to deal with problems such as hacker attacks.

Bloomberg notes that the growth of Internet was fostered by such organisations as the Internet Engineering Task Force, Forum on Internet Governance, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Still, there is no such association for blockchain, despite the growing interest of companies in finance and other sectors to the technology.

“So we decided we are going to make some progress here,” explained Don Tapscott. He hopes that the meeting will give a start to a new professional organisation.

The participants of the upcoming meeting include executive director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Hyperledger Project Brian Behlendorf, a board member of the World Wide Web Foundation Ana Lopez, former White House PR employee Jamie Smith, who is now the head of global communications at BitFury, and Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensus Systems. However, Bloomberg reports that they will attend the reunion as individuals without representing their companies.

Don Tapscott is a well-known Internet researcher and author of several books on digital technologies and education programs. In 2013, he entered the list of Top 50 business thinkers, being recognised as the fourth most influential management speaker.

Lyudmila Brus