A Decentralized Network for Internet of Things, Powered by a Privacy-Centric Blockchain
Pointing out the four major innovations in the whitepaper
“The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly emerging as the manifestation of the networked society vision — everything that benefits from a connection is connected. Despite its rapid evolution, IoT is still far from reaching mass adoption and lacks “killer applications” that would draw new users to the ecosystem due to issues such as low scalability, high operating cost, privacy concerns and lack of functional values.”
IoTeX proposes to solve this with four major innovations
- Blockchains in blockchain for a well balanced distributed network that maximises scalability and privacy in a cost-effective way
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2. Flexible and lightweight IoTeX-based system architectures dedicatedly designed for key IoT applications across multiple industry sectors.
So, what exactly does this mean and what problem is there to be solved? I believe the IoTeX whitepaper does a phenomenal job in explaining this: “Directly Connecting all IoT nodes into one single blockchain is a dream that cannot become true. Besides the fact that different IoT applications requires fundamentally different feature sets of a blockchain, hosting every IoT node on one blockchain makes it grows fast in size and computation, and eventually becomes too heavyweight for many IoT devices. Instead, a separation of duties makes sure each blockchain interacts with a specific group of IoT nodes, and, at the same time, interacts with other blockchains when needed.”
This does make sense, the last thing you want is a blockchain with huge blocks that could potentially saturate by the millions of IoT devices in the future.
To dive a bit deeper in the previous notion that IoT applications requires fundamentally different feature sets of a blockchain: “Each blockchain has different usages and applications, and should be designed and optimized towards different directions. For example, a blockchain that is dedicated to relaying transactions between its subchains does not need to have turning-complete contract running on top of it; another blockchain that connects devices in the same trust zone should not care about transactional privacy too much.”
The proposed Architecture: Blockchains in Blockchain
Combine the previous two paragraphs, and an architecture of a Root Chain with subchains attached to it arises.
Description: “The Root Blockchain manages many independent blockchains, or Subchains. A subchain connects to and interact with IoT devices that share something in common, e.g., they have a similar functional purpose, operate in similar environments, or share the similar level of trust. If a subchain does not function well, e.g., being attacked or experiencing software bugs, the root chain is completely unaffected. In addition, cross blockchain transactions are supported to transfer value and data from subchains to the root chain or from one subchain to another via the root chain.”
“The IoTeX blockchain supports a variety of IoT ecosystems, shared economies, smart home, autonomous vehicles, and supply chain, etc. Different types of developers leverage IoTeX in different ways. The developers supported by IoTeX include IoT hardware manufacturers, IoT device control system developers, smart home app developers, shared economies device manufacturers, supply chain data integrator, data crow-sourcing vendors, autonomous car developers, etc.”
3. True privacy on blockhain based on relayable payment code, constant-size ring signature without trusted setup, and first implementation of bulletproof;
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4. Fast consensus with instant finality greatly improving the throughput of the network and reducing transactional cost
As a comparison to Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s pseudonymity → the transaction amount and the assets being transferred, its metadata, and its relationships to other transactions, can be trivially learned by anyone.
This is not the case for IoTeX, it plans to integrate stealth address for receiver privacy, ring signature for sender privacy and Pedersen Commitments for hiding transaction ammount with the following innovations and improvements:
- A lightweight stealth address scheme is designed to exempt receivers from scanning the entire blockchain to be aware of incoming transactions;
- Ring signature is optimized to make it compact in size with a distributed trusted setup.
Consensus Design
To design and develop a fast and efficient consensus mechanism with instant block finality for IoTeX, they plan to adopt the following technologies: PoS, DPoS, PBFT and VRFs.
“In IoT networks, we expect a lot of devices are light clients, which are the blockchain participants that don’t record the full transaction history locally. IoT devices may not have the capacity to download the full blockchain. However, these light clients still have the ability to quickly verify the correctness of the blockchain and interact with it. However, using PoS instead of PoW has a disadvantage for light clients. When verifying correctness of PoS based blockchains, clients need to download a list of public keys and signatures for block proposers and voters, and the set of block proposers and voters may change for each block. Thus, when light clients come back online after staying offline for a while, the clients may need to download a large number of public keys and signatures, and then verify all of them. To mitigate this performance issue, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, has proposed to create periodic checkpoints on the blockchain, called epochs, for example every 50 blocks. Each checkpoint can be verified based on the previous checkpoints, such that light clients can catch up with the whole blockchain much faster.”
Website: https://iotex.io/
Whitepaper: https://iotex.io/white-paper
Telegram: https://iotex.io/telegram
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iotex_io
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/FYIcryptoz