This review doesn’t do justice to Waltonchain at all and is clearly not objective.
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>“has strictly limited itself to RFID technology”
That’s wrong. Silictec, Waltonchain’s subsidiary has started their mass production for IR chips and might develop many other kinds of sensors in the future, such as gesture recognition sensors, PM 2.5 detection air purity sensors, etc. (https://medium.com/@Waltonchain_EN/waltonchain-march-ama-part-1-a4dc391ce231)
Furthermore, they are partnered with NDIS (https://www.nids.co.kr/) which provides them with other kind of sensors they may need.
Their WTC-Food solution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7M_QjcsO1s) already leverages many kind of sensors:
- Users can get information on soil PH, nutrient content, air quality, fertilizing and feeding data real time.
- Food raw material information/storage/temperature/humidity/videos/ozone data, is uploaded to the Waltonchain Parentchain
From the whitepaper we can also read (p.44):
“We also developed a smart data collecting device with independent
intellectual property rights, which automatically collects, processes and
uploads various sensor data, audio and video, location information, etc. to
blockchain.”
One of the Waltonchain chief experts, Wei Songie, also contributed to 2 patents related to LEO satellite networks (https://hackernoon.com/blockchains-in-space-the-internet-of-things-will-run-on-a-leo-satellite-network-6148ad5ea50f), so their team’s expertise goes far beyond blockchain and RFID.
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>“Waltonchain is mainly focused on working within China and the Chinese government”
Although they have extremely strong Chinese government ties, they are also supported by South Korea, where they have a partnership with the Korean Standards Association and the South Korean Ministry of Trade (https://medium.com/@Waltonchain_EN/walton-blockchain-institute-signs-partnership-agreement-with-korea-standards-association-365d04921fff). Furthermore, they have partners in Brazil, New-Zealand & USA as mentioned in the whitepaper.
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“unclear how Waltonchain plans to address long-term scalability issues”
Waltonchain actually managed to solve what many others are trying to do, which is to find practical ways to apply the scalability strategies of traditional distributed systems (e.g. sharding, clustering) to blockchain networks. Horizontal scaling is the way to go and that’s what they achieve with child chains and their proprietary cross-chain protocol. On the other hand, blockchains that are focused on high single-chain TPS will always hit a bottleneck. Here’s the filed patent although translation makes it pretty difficult to understand: https://patents.google.com/patent/CN108389047A/en
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>“no clear mention is provided for how much it will cost companies to use the Waltonchain ecosystem, nor where the data will be stored, nor who is allowed to upload data onto the network”
It’s based on offer & demand like it should with decentralized networks. You can’t possibly set a specific network usage cost unless you have a centralized solution, which defeats the whole purpose of blockchains. There’s a limited token supply and incentives to make sure that the WTC token demand grows as the network gets more adoption. Data will get stored in child chains, sensors, the parent chain and even centralized databases depending on specific industry solutions.
“The sensor data can be stored directly in the child chains, and it can also be stored in a system independent of the blockchain. The data is not just a hash value stored on the main net.” (https://medium.com/@Waltonchain_EN/waltonchain-march-ama-part-1-a4dc391ce231)
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You are also wrong on the core industry focus. “CEO Mo Bing -Waltonchain will be the Qualcomm + Cisco in the blockchain industry, the ‘Google’ of blockchain”. https://medium.com/@Waltonchain_EN/interview-with-waltonchain-ceo-mo-bing-waltonchain-will-be-the-qualcomm-cisco-in-the-blockchain-f6dae867353a
“The Waltonchain team and the community have been committed to
establishing a complete, reliable, credible, scalable and transferable
data-value-oriented blockchain ecosystem of the Internet of Everything,
and strives to make Waltonchain an integrated data collection equipment
manufacturer, data communication researcher and developer, and data
service provider.” — Whitepaper p.41
I dont think their scope could get much wider than that…
