While a Web3 Internet offers a promising future, it is not a standard and needs to be built on actual technologies such as IPv6 and blockchain. This is the view of Ralph Wallace (CEO of CyberSpatiale) who was speaking at the sidelines of the recent London Blockchain Conference.
Wallace explained that he has been involved in the IPv6 space for almost a decade at the US Internal Revenue Service. He explained that the US government has a mandate in place for all federal agencies to transition to IPv6. ‘During that time I was very successful with transitioning the IRS infrastructure for 90,000 workstations, and 40,000 servers across 512 sites in the United States of the IRS, and getting them to IPv6’.
‘And so before I retired from the federal service, I was invited to join the executive committee of the Federal IPv6 Task Force. During that time on the executive committee, I helped form the latest memo that’s in place for the US government to get to IPv6 by 2025.’
IPv6 is necessary – but adoption is slow
When the Internet was first developed, IPv4 was the standard used to assign addresses to connected devices. IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet Protocol, was standardised in 1981 and used a 32-bit address space, supporting approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses. Initially, this seemed sufficient, but the rapid expansion of the Internet and the proliferation of connected devices soon highlighted its limitations.
To address this, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) introduced IPv6 in 1998, featuring a 128-bit address space to accommodate an almost infinite number of devices, especially with the rise of the Internet of Things.
IPv6’s capacity for end-to-end networking is essential for leveraging the efficiencies and capabilities of an expansive blockchain protocol like the BSV blockchain.
Wallace explained that the role of the IPv6 forum is to establish collaboration between private organisations, academia, vendors and other parties to help establish the transition to IPv6.
‘Web3 is a great concept, but it’s not a standard. There are other standards like semantic web, which is Web2. Trying to define amorphous things is sometimes difficult from a technology perspective. So IPv6 is there and it works fine.’
IPv6 and the BSV blockchain
Wallace explained that IPv6 is also necessary to get the full benefits of blockchain. ‘You’ve got to use the network to get to the components of blockchain. So if you’re talking about getting to the components and you’re using the IPV6 Internet to do it, that’s the best way to do it. You can use it to verify that the packets are getting to the right people at the right time.’
Despite IPv6‘s clear advantages, its adoption has been slow due to the significant infrastructure changes required. The BSV blockchain stands out as the only public blockchain scalable enough to meet the demands of enterprise-scale applications. It is designed to function as an Internet extension, enabling peer-to-peer payments and complex data transfers without intermediaries.
