“If you do not establish a decentralized environment, it is impossible to develop a true Internet of Things (IoT). Binding devices to remote servers of IT companies is only the original stage of IoT development, not the final stage.
As the number of devices such as the Internet of Things in any given system grows, the weaknesses of the traditional centralized model are gradually beginning to surface, such as insufficient bandwidth and data passing through fragile centralized servers. These inefficiencies can be solved by establishing a multi-agent system, in which each participant has greater autonomy and can perform a wider range of tasks. This trend should include the ability of equipment to independently accept orders and complete payment for orders, as well as the ability to sign contracts with other equipment without manual intervention.
The emergence of Ethereum smart contracts first made this concept a reality, but due to limited bandwidth, high transaction costs, and lack of a “common language” with other blockchains, development bottlenecks and shackles were created, unless the developer proposed a solution It is difficult to break through the upgrade and transformation of Ethereum itself, such as the development of special “transition bridges” for specific situations.
As the flagship project of Parity and the Web3 Foundation-Polkadot will be the most likely and currently the most suitable to realize the vision of Web 3.0, and will provide the possibility and smarter for millions of smart devices to connect to the global network solution. Polkadot’s sharding protocol provides opportunities for communication between blockchains. Below we will explain in detail why the Internet of Things industry has become one of the main beneficiaries of the Internet Protocol, and review the most promising Internet of Things projects on Polkadot.
Why people always talk about Polkadot
Half a year after the Polkadot main network was launched, it was first recognized by developers from all walks of life. According to CoinGecko’s comments above, at the time of writing, Polkadot’s token DOT ranked seventh among all blockchains, with a market capitalization of US$4.15 billion and a daily trading volume of nearly US$100 million. These results are impressive, especially considering that the initial token sale in 2017 attracted a large amount of financing and achieved a good story, but it is incomparable with today’s capital of 145 million US dollars.
This market response is due to the widespread demand for communication protocols between blockchains by developers representing decentralized applications, mainly in the DeFi field. The three-year product of the Web3 Foundation has solved the bandwidth and scalability problems, because Polkadot, as the underlying building of the blockchain, has the ability to combine different blockchains.
Sharding is a feature of Polkadot that allows the blockchain network to be divided into segments that act as nodes or transaction verification procedures. Different from Ethereum, the sharding model dispatches tasks between nodes when each node calculates each operation and processes each transaction, so that multiple transactions can be verified in parallel. Compared with the Ethereum network, this greatly increases the speed of transaction processing, which has led some media to call Polkadot the “Ethereum Killer.” According to PolkaProject, the number of projects deployed in the Polkadot network is about to reach 300, an increase of one-third from the beginning of September. Although commenting on promising projects on Polkadot has become a function of news media including DeFi, the IoT field on Polkadot has not yet been exposed by the attention of specific industry media, so we decided to study the Polkadot project in this field.
Smart devices are still not “smart”
Unlike the Polkadot ecology of the DeFi market segment which has as many as 21 projects, the IoT section only provides us with three projects-Nodle IoT, MXC and Robonomics. When I first tried to understand them, I found that they have many similarities.
The goal of MXC is to establish a global network for the communication of IoT devices. MXC itself (Machine eXchange Coin) is a protocol that uses LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology, which is an energy-saving remote network, simply a wireless technology, used to transmit data between sensors. The project provides an intelligent bidding system for sensors to provide access to the network and the data market combined with various blockchains.
Similar to the other two projects in the IOT field, MXC announced the small goal of creating a decentralized environment for many smart devices. Today, the number of such equipment produced is in billions. However, the sensors and microprocessors currently equipped with smartphones, scooters or smart vacuum cleaners do not make them independent “smart” products. In order to truly make the device, the device needs a permanent Internet connection to receive and transmit data and the ability to interact with other systems.
MXC was incubated by Candaq, a case of entering China from Germany. MXC is the first innovative project founded by Chinese in Germany that combines the Internet of Things and blockchain. It is a representative project in the third-generation innovation wave in Europe. After MXC signed a cooperation agreement with the governments of Shanghai and Chengdu and promoted its implementation, MXC once again received investment and strong support from the Hangzhou government.
Internet of Things functions to be realized by smartphones
The ability to continuously access millions of devices and sensors online is not easy nor easy. The more important issue is actually security. Devices serving smart homes may be attacked by hackers and cause a certain degree of danger. For example, there is no water in the kettle when boiling hot water. Similar risks will be amplified in the application of large industrial enterprises with expensive equipment. Any cargo warehouse will not agree to hand over all the work to IoT devices without guaranteeing that the system will not be hacked, for example, loading and unloading scenes such as trucks equipped with automated driving systems.
The decentralized network Nodle can provide continuous access to the Internet for IoT devices and sensors. Its participants are the users’ smartphones, which act as the Internet center for IoT devices. Smartphones with Internet access rights provide access rights to devices through Bluetooth low energy technology.
Users can install an APP on their mobile phones, which allows nearby IoT devices to transmit updated data to the Internet. In exchange, the owner of the smartphone will receive a reward (proof of connection) in the form of Nodle network currency. The smartphone acts as a secure data transfer from the device to the cloud while maintaining the user’s anonymity.
What the Nodle ecosystem has in common with Polkadot’s other two IoT projects, MXC and Robonomics Network, is that it can realize machine-to-machine communication and open up the data of the Internet of Things by providing device data for enterprises, government departments and individual users. market.
Nodle’s official website focuses on the solution in logistics services such as shared electric vehicles and shared bicycles, which can track the location of vehicles and their routes through sensors. We can also equip anything with sensors, including express packages or electric cars parked in warehouses, to track and analyze dynamic data with sensors.
Substrate provides a simpler and more efficient tool for building IoT
Similar to other projects in the Polkadot ecological market segment, the Nodle network needs to be expanded to have the ability to send millions of small and micro transactions to smartphone owners as a reward for maintaining the operation of the network. To this end, it is necessary to use Substrate’s development tools. Substrate is a set of blockchain construction tools developed by the Parity team to create customized blockchains for DApps. This open access technology is written in the Rust language and integrated with Polkadot’s interoperability protocol, enabling autonomous IoT networks to connect to other blockchains.
The developers of the Robonomics Network platform created five years ago have already seen the opportunities behind this technology. According to the eye-catching founder Sergei Lonshakov (Sergei Lonshakov), Substrate is “the most direct way to publish on Polkadot.”
As far as Robonomics is concerned, the project indicates that it is a parachain built to control robots. By supporting the parallelism of Ethereum and Polkadot, the platform plans to open a wide range of applications to the decentralized network for automated tasks.
Based on the application scenarios of 13 platforms at different stages of operation, Robonomics is to some extent waiting for the emergence of Polkadot. Robonomics has a wide range of use cases, from drones that monitor the water environment of rivers to cars that constantly exchange driving spaces on highways. Their data lacks the ability to trade on Ethereum. In order to expand its functions, the platform relies on Polkadot’s cousin network Kusama to achieve, and the protocol is also based on Substrate.
Kusama was launched last summer and aims to provide a testing platform for developers who want to become a Polkadot parachain and understand the functions of Polkadot itself. Robonomics plans to participate in the two-year Kusama parachain auction. At the same time, the team will plan to gradually transition to Polkadot’s relay chain.
The team plans to attract IoT service developers through a set of tools called Robonomics Web Services (RWS), which can be said to be a decentralized version of Amazon Web Services. But what RWS wants to do more is to surpass its cloud competitors in terms of technical capabilities and security.
It is expected that project development on Polkadot will accelerate in the future to ensure that hundreds of millions of people can easily interact with artificial intelligence operators, and enterprises will have the opportunity to develop automated and intelligent equipment deployment services without worrying about external risks. Such expectations have given people a clearer understanding of the enthusiasm of the Polkadot ecological project and the rapidly growing capitalization.
