The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has setup an industry group aimed at looking at the possibility of deploying private blockchains across various industries and governmental institutions.

The ‘Permissioned Distributed Ledgers’ group boasts founding members including Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Telefónica, and Vodafone. These companies will work with the ETSI group to look at the challenges of using permissioned distributed ledgers, the business use cases, and the functional architecture and solutions for the operation of permissioned distributed ledgers – including interfaces, APIs, protocols, and information and data models.

The group’s first meeting will take place on 24 January 2019 at Telefónica, Madrid. Here, the project will be discussed, and officials will be elected from each of the member companies.

A permissioned distributed ledger is a private deployment of blockchain technology which has more business uses cases than the common permissionless ledgers, which are public, such as popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.