The Alliance

The Alliance
Photo by Marlis Trio Akbar / Unsplash

Chain Agnostic Standards Alliance is an informal coöperative established in October 2019 to advance interoperability between decentralized data systems. There is no formal membership, but:

  1. Everyone who sees contributions through to merging is considered a "contributor".
  2. Over the years, many non-contributors have signed to signal their support on our github page.
  3. All meetings are open to the public.

Remit

The primary mission of the Alliance is to facilitate standardization and engineering across "chains," meaning decentralized data systems (blockchains, directed acyclical graphs, distributed hash tables, etc). Historically, this has mostly consisted of two standing projects:

1. The Chain-Agnostic Improvement Proposals, modeled on the improvement proposal processes within each decentralized systems' community, which produce something like lightweight IETF internet-drafts, and
2. The namespaces registry, where various decentralized communities can self-document how CAIPs apply to their networks and virtual machines.

Additionally, working groups to tackle topic areas or interrelated CAIPs (such as the JSON-RPC working group, that iterates on standards for bootstrapping wallet<>application JSON-RPC connections over browsers and other connections) spin up and down as activity happens.

Newsletter

If you would like to receive regular updates in the form of email, you can subscribe to the newsletter. These go out once or twice per quarter, maximum.

Financial support

To date, financial support for the mission has come in the form of targeted grants, which have historically sustained specific working groups or registries. We also accept on-chain contributions via Ethereum mainnet at chainstandards.eth. Small honoraria are given to support janitorial work and maintenance of specifications, registries, and public libraries, but no structured grants have been awarded or administered through the alliance to date. Reach out if you have a project in mind that could be administered through CASA to benefit public goods within CASA's remit.