IOTA Hardware Developments and Possible Offline Tangle Integrations
There have been several hardware developments in the IOTA community that deserve recognition. Also recently someone created a private tangle and this has significant strengths that several other blockchain communities haven’t thought about.
The Rise of IOTA’s Hardware
Hardware Wallets
There have been several attempts to create a hardware wallets so the IOTA community can have a better user experience for transacting their IOTA securely. Community developers have worked together to create software that will make this a reality. Popular hardware wallets, such as Trezor and Ledger, have had IOTA community developments but the IOTA Ledger development team has had more progress.
The IOTA Ledger development team recently finished configuring IOTA functionalities to the Ledger and wanted to work on a web wallet so IOTA users could finally have their IOTA in their Ledger.
Although we have just heard that Trinity is 5~6 weeks away from beta, something big was not mentioned in the Trinity wallet features. Trinity wallet will be integrating the Ledger support the IOTA Ledger development team has been working on!
I am very excited about the Ledger integration. If you don’t have a Ledger product, you can get one here.
Here is Bart Slinger’s Trezor IOTA wallet implementation. I have not found more information regarding this implementation and I believe he is the only one currently working on it. This implementation signs transactions and sends the remainder of the transaction to a new generated wallet address. If you would like to know how he created this check out his blog.
Other Wallets
This IOTA wallet implementation is still in its proof of concept phase but it shows some great promise!
“Address generation 188ms, signing tests soon”
This is Roman Semko’s CarrIOTA, an IOTA financial manager system with possible hardware integration. This will allow you to have control of several wallets that your IoT devices hold. Check out the details here.
“We are experimenting to make it work on an SBC (single board computer) such as Raspberry Pi, which you plug into your router at home, boot with a CarrIOTA SD-card and start using!”
This is iMarkett’s IOTA Encrypted USB Wallets. These wallets are encrypted to your custom password and within it they hold a secure offline seed generator and the official IOTA wallet 2.5.7. When Trinity wallet is released, the USBs will use that wallet instead. These USBs are currently only for MacOs systems but we are working to make them for Linux and Windows operating systems.
To learn more about the security of this and how it works you can check it out here.
IOTA Masked Authenticated Messaging Hardware
Bosch Connected Devices released the XDK which is a great prototyping tool to create proof of concepts with several sensors. The XDK has access to IOTA’s Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) in order to be able to encrypt the data such device would post to the Tangle and giving certain individuals access to such data with an encryption key. You can check out community developments here. If you’re interested in prototyping with this device you can purchase it through Bosch’s website.
RuuviTag has made IOTA’s MAM a plugin for their creators to be able to use this feature. IOTA and RuuviTag collaborated together to attend Ethereum Camp and some creators made projects using MAM and RuuviTags.
There have been several other hardware integrations using MAM. If you want to learn how to use RuuviTag and MAM you can check out RuuviLabs.
Akita Blockchain Solutions have been working hard to apply the Tangle data infrastructure to several machines. Here to the left we see iHEARTiota prototype with the ability to send heart rate data using a FitBit. In the image of the stair workout machine we can see that the workout data might possibly be sent to the Tangle after the workout is over. I suggest following them on Twitter to keep up to date with their developments.
Offline Tangle With Hardware
These developments are great for urban based cities but we need to think on how IOTA can change financial systems where internet connectivity isn’t readily available.
If you’ve ever been in a country without much internet connectivity you know that you can’t really check Twitter, let alone your bank account, whenever you want. How can we use IOTA to make these individuals transact value?
With the assumption that there are only Android phones or flip phones available how can we make cryptocurrency understood by these individuals? They have been used to paper based currency most of their lives and don’t trust what they can’t physically see or touch.
How about creating a cheap, and I mean really cheap, device that allows the connection of another device. This would mean that one connection is to receive IOTA and the other connection is to pay IOTA.
A device with these features can create an offline Tangle with a community with little internet connectivity. This offline Tangle will allow the community members to transact amongst each other instantly and they will be able to see their balances on the device (if it has some sort of screen). After some time let’s say the end of the day a community member can upload the offline transactions online to be validated amongst the whole network. What is important is that these individuals will have to trust these devices. If these individuals trust these devices that must mean that we have reached a critical level of adoption of IOTA in the world. These little devices could be the IOTA wallets for those that don’t have access to internet connectivity with the creation of offline Tangles that can be uploaded to the main Tangle.
Such devices can be applied to places of low internet connectivity as well such as a cruise, another country, Mars, spaceships, etc. I am not exactly sure how to build such a device or how offline Tangles can possibly work. This is just a way to get even more scalability with IOTA to get those individuals that are not a part of everyday internet connection.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this post. My upcoming post will be named “History Repeats Itself, A Story On Technology Adoption”. It will state the trends of adoption of past technologies such as electricity and the internet.
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