The term Internet of Things (IoT) is used to represent a network of uniquely identifiable physical objects that are connected to each other through the internet and exchange information with each other. IoT has increasingly become one of the hottest topics in recent times. The popular analytics software Statistica estimates the number of connected devices ( IoT) worldwide in 2025 to be around 75 Billion. Given this number, safe to say that IoT is poised to bring about radical changes in every industry in the future including manufacturing, digital design, automation, consumer-facing applications, among many others. However, there are few critical issues associated with existing centralized IoT systems; security, scalability, privacy, high operation costs etc.
With Blockchain technology and decentralized systems built on top of it, most of the above issues can be solved. Again, popular public blockchains of today do not scale well and/or have privacy, security issues. The heterogeneity of devices within the IoT context doesn’t help either. The proposed solution is a private, secure, scalable and IoT-centric blockchain that can handle the large quantity and heterogeneity of IoT devices. IoTeX is exactly that — An IoT-oriented blockchain that can lead to the dawn of unstoppable IoT applications and ecosystems with the ability to change the world.
Based on the architecture called Blockchains in Blockchain, one of the key design principles of IoTeX is Separation of Duties, as connecting all IoT nodes to a single blockchain is considered undesirable due to the heterogeneity of the nodes. Each blockchain has a different usage and applications and hence should interact only with a specific group of IoT nodes. Further, each blockchain can interact with another blockchain when required. So on hand, you could have a blockchain that values transaction privacy but not too much on Turing completeness. On the other hand, you could have a blockchain with Turing complete contracts that do need focus much on privacy. This “horses for courses” works well within the IoT context.
IoTex is a network of many blockchains that are hierarchically arranged, where many blockchains run concurrently with one another while retaining their interoperability.
There will be a root blockchain that manages individual blockchains or subchains. And the subchains, of course, are connected by the IoT nodes that serve a common purpose or share a similar trust-level or even operate within similar environments. This architecture makes the root chain immune to any attacks or handicaps inflicted on the subchains. The root chain serves as the relayer, supervisor and the settlement authority of payments. Incorporation of cryptographic concepts such as Ring Signatures and ZK-Snarks will ensure that privacy is preserved during transactions.
The IoTex framework will facilitate the development of subchains for third party stakeholders such as device manufactures, IoT related industries. The subchains will use an account based model and may use their own utility tokens thus creating a highly flexible ecosystem for the users of the subchains to build their IoT DApps. Among the various options considered for the Virtual Machine (VM)design, Web Assembly (WASM) is given preference because it can be used to create high-performance web applications and also due to the fact that multiple languages can be compiled to WASM.
“We are designing a user-friendly development toolkit which will lower the barriers for users developing DApps on subchains significantly. In the future, IoTeX will be providing training sessions regarding subchain provisioning”-
IoTeX team during their recent AMA session
Consensus mechanism used in IoTex combines the basic principles of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Verifiable Random Functions (VRF). This novel combo technique is known an Randomised Delegated Proof of Stake or R-DPoS and will rapidly improve the time to transaction finality. The R-DPoS works in four stages elect candidates, form committee, propose block and finalize block. The ingredient of R-DPoS is the VRF that supplies deterministic randomness that is highly immune to attacks and hence makes the system safe. VRF is based on Silvio Micali’s famous Algorand.
The IoTeX ecosystem will be powered by a native cryptocurrency known as IOTX. IOTX will be required to power the transactions and to run the distributed applications. Initially available as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network, these versions of IOTX will be swapped for native IOTX once the IoTeX mainnet goes live.
IoTeX powered ecosystems will include the likes of Sharing Economies (sharing of a wide variety of items within the items not limited to just cars, homes, bikes but also battery banks, umbrella etc.), Identity Management and Smart Home.
Based in Menlo Park, California, the IoTeX team consist of individuals with expertise in multiple domains such as distributed systems, cryptography, and IoT. The founders are Raullen Chai, Qevan Guo, and Jing Sun. Each one of them has got an impressive resume.