The Trusted IoT Alliance came together through some initial discussions around October 2016. There were messages and email threads among the founding members that wanted to get together a group of like-minded individuals seeking to answer what the intersection of blockchain and IoT means. In early December 2016, Ryan Orr from Chronicled and Srinivasan Sriram from SKUChain proposed the idea. We had people from automotive, banking, large companies, startups, small companies, people working on security and capital markets. What’s interesting is that everyone is trying to figure out blockchain and IoT. 75- 80% of the people in the room realized that everyone was trying to reproduce everyone else’s work from an infrastructure perspective.
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Anoop Nannra Co-Founder and Chairman |
What are some of the challenges you are trying to address?
If you have an asset –a physical/digital asset that’s deployed – how do you register an asset? How do you get updates? How does the network verify the authenticity of the data from that asset? When we think about an IoT edge ecosystem, what does it mean to have a digital wallet?
When everyone is going off in their own direction, it would take forever for blockchain and IoT to take off. We wanted to put together a model to advance the story of blockchain and IoT with some common references or architectures, then the rising tide would float all boats.
What are the objectives of the alliance?
The Trusted IoT Alliance is a not for profit 501(c) 6 launched in September 2017 with 12 initial founding members – 5 large companies and 7 startups. We for the first time brought together a fairly good cross section of the blockchain space. There are people invested in Ethereum, Hyperledger and some other technologies as well.
We are not trying to build standards. The objective of the alliance is not to say which blockchain technology is better - the objective is to identify the commonality that we need to satisfy from business owners’ perspective so that the assets we connect and applications we build can interoperate in a blockchain-agnostic fashion.
We are separating the technology from the business functions. People should pick and choose the technologies that best suit their needs. From an application perspective there should be some commonality.
We are trying to come up with an architecture and validate it while at the same time provide the right kind of tooling and access for someone looking to build a blockchain agnostic application stack so that they are building to specifications that the community will develop.
We’ve published an architectural perspective. We don’t need to create new IoT or blockchain frameworks – there are plenty of best in class IoT frameworks – how can we enhance these protocols and add value back into the community.
Can you share some examples?
For telco provisioning, TR-69 is a good standard. We want to help answer what would be the way to blockchain enable this, and does it make sense? We want to help people who are building apps blockchain-enable TR-69 applications.
What kind of work are you doing with the Alliance?
We’ve also announced a series of award programs. One is for the QTUM Foundation and the other is around the Testnet. Anyone can participate in the programs, and the goal is to fund projects and initiatives that advance IoT work. The QTUM award is applications for IoT projects that leverage the QTUM protocol stack. The rest of the community can gain from the insights from what’s being done.
Cisco is providing the funding from the Testnet – this is the worlds’ first globally deployed interoperability sandbox. We have a variety of blockchain locations where we have nodes installed. We will provide a framework where multiple blockchain protocols can exist simultaneously. This is all driven by market requirements.
The Alliance is not dictating what protocols go into the sandbox. We are providing a framework with transaction history and depth, where any one of the members can add their own nodes. It’s managed by the membership with nodes all over the world. One of the rationales for a geographically distributed sandbox is that we learn a lot from the network performance. We get to see the data from how blockchain applications are performing, and people can learn from this.
What’s planned in the future?
There will be a second face to face meeting that will be open to public – the first was in February at Deutsche Telekom T-Labs in Berlin. We are also setting up mobility and energy working groups. The driving motivation for new membership seems to be access to technology in a low-cost way where you can be quickly up and running. What we are not seeing in the sandboxes is how things are operating in the real world.
One of the things we are hoping to get to, over time, is how to instantiate a certification program around blockchain interoperability and application developers, extending the scope of the Testnet and the sandbox where someone wants to prove their app can work with different blockchain technologies that’s what we want to do.
The Alliance is up to around 50 members, smaller than other consortia. We do not want to be advancing hype in the blockchain space. We seem to be addressing a significant need that’s existed almost since day one in the blockchain space.
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