EVRYTHNG, the “Internet of Things” (IoT) platform has joined hands with IOTA Foundation, the “Distributed Ledger Technology” (DLT) project. This partnership will likely act as a significant boost for blockchain IoT use cases.
The EVRYTHNG/IOTA partnership will focus on IoT-enabled consumer products, and securing the communication between IoT-enabled devices. Their joint effort will likely ease secure IoT implementation.
IoT already has a significantly large market, and this market is growing noticeably. A Statista report estimates that the global market for IoT will reach $457.29 billion in 2020.
Despite its promises, implementing IoT is often challenging. The world will see an estimated 30 billion IoT-enabled devices by 2020, and they communicate over the Internet.
As repeated instances of cyber attacks show, the communication between IoT devices is vulnerable. The impact of compromised IoT networks can be serious, and we only need to imagine the consequences of a hacked smart grid to understand that! Experts indeed raise concerns over such security risks with respect to IoT.
Ideally, blockchain with its security features like decentralization, data encryption, consensus algorithms, and tamper-proof smart contracts should be able to protect the security of IoT devices. However, blockchain doesn’t scale sufficiently for that yet.
Blockchain networks like Bitcoin use “Proof of Work” (POW) consensus algorithm, which requires all nodes to participate in transaction validation. IoT networks can potentially have millions of IoT devices, and this scale is hard to achieve with blockchain networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
This will also result in high transaction fees, therefore, IoT networks with micropayment as a use case will not be viable. These limitations of blockchain networks are what make the EVRYTHNG/IOTA partnership significant. Let’s understand why.
The importance of EVRYTHNG/IOTA partnership
EVRYTHNG, an IoT platform provider helps businesses including consumer product companies implement IoT to enhance their customer experience. EVRYTHNG is trying to address the security concerns of IoT applications using blockchain.
IOTA Foundation is in a unique position to help here. They base their platform on the innovative “Directed Acyclic Graph” (DAG) technology, therefore, IOTA has no block, and no chain like Bitcoin.
As a result, IOTA doesn’t use the computation-intensive POW consensus algorithm. Accordingly, they don’t need to involve all nodes in transaction validation, which improves scalability. This makes IOTA suitable for the IoT environment.
This is precisely the reason why EVRYTHNG has now teamed up with IOTA Foundation. Their partnership will now let consumer product manufacturers incorporate IoT and make smart appliances, powered with the security features of DLT.
A growing number of businesses and government organizations are now exploring IOTA for blockchain IoT use cases, e.g., Bosch has teamed up with IOTA to launch secure devices for IoT data collection. The city government of Austin, Texas has recently announced a partnership with IOTA Foundation to transform the transportation systems in the city.
IOTA to help IoT grow?
IoT is massive, however, security challenges continue to put a question mark. IOTA brings the much needed blockchain-like security measures to its aid, therefore, the new EVRYTHNG/IOTA partnership could help IoT fulfill its potential.
