As of March 2022, there were around 10,400 Cryptocurrencies available, with a total market cap of around $2 Trillion down from an all-time high of almost $3 Trillion in November od 20211),2). DIDO implementations and interest in them are currently in the Positive Hype part of the technology Hype-Cycle as defined by Gartner.3).
The naming of the Hypecurve is new, but the understanding of the hype curves has a long history.
A major concern and part of the motivation behind the creation of a Reference Architecture (RA) is the lack of a comprehensive mechanism to evaluate all the risks associated with DIDO implementations (especially cryptocurrencies). Many of the risks to DIDOs are common to distributed computing and have already been identified and addressed using risk mitigators in existing processes, procedures, and standards. An example is vulnerabilities in source code. Unfortunately, no statistics are available regarding how rigorously these risk mitigators are applied to DIDOs, if at all. Specifying a Reference Architecture and cross-referencing its components to a set of existing standards establishes the following: