Why is interoperability imperative in making blockchain technology a success?
There is a vast number of email service providers on the internet: Gmail, Yahoo, outlook, and many more. What if all of these services were not interoperable? Meaning what would email services have looked like if users from Gmail could only mail other users on Gmail and no one on any of the other providers? The concept of emails would have been much less useful than it is today.
Think of banking as another example. If users from bank X can only transfer and receive funds from other users on bank X, and no other bank is supported for these transactions, would the banking system have been as useful as it is today? The answer would be no, and the reason would be a lack of interoperability.
Banks and emails (and many other services) had to become interoperable with other platforms and companies to be successful. The same is the case with blockchain technology. Blockchain is a relatively new promising technology in the market. But for it to become more than that, for it to become the next revolution on the internet, it would have to become interoperable just like banking and emails had to become.
What is interoperability in blockchain?
Since the inception of this idea over a decade ago by Satoshi Nakamoto, thousands of people have adopted the technology and have created blockchains of their own. After Nakamoto’s bitcoin, many more blockchains were created like Ethereum and Binance etc. These blockchains have different functions (bitcoin is purely a cryptocurrency platform, while Ethereum is a base for most decentralized apps today), and have different capabilities in terms of scalability and utility.
But all of these different blockchains exist in their own isolated silos. They are not connected to each other and hence interoperability like the one that exists among current banking/email systems is not possible in blockchains at this stage. The ability for all of these isolated blockchains to be connected in some way, conducting transactions, and exchanging data would be the interoperability that is needed for blockchain to reach its true potential.
