Introducing weeveOS — The first Operating System designed for Blockchain-enabled Internet of Things
A note to our community: Weeve’s innovative and security driven approach to unite the fragmented IoT space, in combination with Blockchain technology, will empower the Economy of Things. In a decentralized and open source world community is key — join ours on Telegram.
We, the Weeve team, have been cultivating a community around our technology and would like to share our vision, mission and goals with you.
What is Weeve in a nutshell…?
Internet of Things + Blockchain Technology + Weeve = Economy of Things
We are excited to announce the weeveOS alpha release, as an important milestone in our technological roadmap. This bridges the gap between the IoT and Blockchain worlds.
Weeve’s Vision
Weeve creates a network of truthful and attested IoT data consumers and producers, who autonomously commercialize digital assets through marketplaces. This empowers new IoT economies that form the Economy of Things.
We envision public or private marketplaces for any form of digital asset ranging from geo-data to electricity or delivery status, where data producers and consumers (resp., buyers and sellers) come together, escrow their supply and demand, and fairly exchange their digital assets for agreed upon prices through the Weeve token.
Weeve’s Mission
Weeve’s mission is to empower the Economy of Things where IoT machines (or “weeves” thereof) index, process, attest and trade harvested data against digital assets.
The Future of IoT
Internet-of-things (IoT) devices are approaching critical mass, and today we lack the necessary interoperability, data rights, and security infrastructures to fully enable new markets and paradigm shifts. Gartner estimates as many as 8 billion IoT devices connected in 2017, and some predict as many as 28 billion IoT devices by 2021. Reports suggest $4–11 trillion a year in new economic value by 2025.
Blockchain technologies have recently emerged with a powerful new paradigm to create new economies. In fact, they are a stepping stone to the fully automated commercialization of data between devices, empowering what we call the Economy of Things. In the Economy of Things, IoT devices on behalf of their owners (private individuals, enterprises, or any legal entity), offer their data through concepts known as first-price or second-price marketplaces and other IoT devices consume the data in exchange for crypto coins or related digital assets (e.g., trade geo-data for temperature-data). Imagine, for example, a solar panel selling excess energy to an electric vehicle in exchange for crypto coins.
The necessity of weeve and nascent data assets
- Securely connect IoT devices with weeve Protocol to enable the transfer of value (data) as a digital asset. The internet enables the sharing of information and weeve will enable the transfer of value from one IoT device to another.
- To securely harvest, process and transport data from origin-point (sensor) to end-point (blockchain) to be traded
- To empower data trading marketplaces that fashion autonomous, machine-to-machine digital asset trades (data and cryptocurrencies)
- To empower the Economy of Things
- To attain a high-quality data standard
- To prevent trading fake data and unfair data prices
- To counterfeit a black-market economy, plagiarism and infringements
Technological Architecture
The Weeve team has designed and developed three foundational technologies — the weeveOS, Weeve Platform and Weeve Network — to implement the vision of IoT data commercialization in a self-governed and fair way.
weeveOS
This is the first lightweight IoT-Blockchain Operating System. It runs on commodity IoT hardware supporting the ARM Trustzone extension. Meanwhile the extension is a standard module of ARM architectures supported by all major chip manufacturers. ARM Trustzone can be seen as the dual to the Intel SGX architecture.
Loosely speaking, ARM addresses the lightweight embedded and IoT domain while Intel targets the computation-heavy desktop and server domain. Similar to Intel’s SGX technology, ARM Trustzone offers cutting-edge security mechanisms ranging from secure boot, trusted storage to isolation of security-critical programs (enclaves). In other words, the additional security features leverage a so-called Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) shielding programs from compromise.
This additional security shielding is a desideratum when, for instance, a wallet runs on the IoT devices allowing to initiate blockchain transactions. To protect the theft of cryptocoins and to reduce the exploitation of the blockchain network, the wallet should run in the most shielded environment, needless to say that being the Trusted Execution Environment.
The whole TEE machinery is necessary to realize security functionalities that commodity IoT Operating Systems today mostly lack to provide. In fact, the majority of today’s IoT Operating Systems have not been been designed with emphasis on security-by-design. The weeveOS put forth by the team is an open-source Operating System specifically suited for lightweight IoT devices aiming to securely interconnect with a blockchain.
To implement the vision of an economy of things, a game-changing requirement is the attestation and secure transportation of tokenized data to the blockchain. Otherwise, the data traded over marketplaces can be fake, manipulated and absurd with little economic utility.
The weeveOS project has been designed with the premise to realize,
- trustworthy sensing and processing,
- authentic and confidential transportation, and
- value assessment of non-falsifiable IoT data.
It makes use of recent advances in cryptographic and system security research to make sure data is not fake. When the IoT harvests data, tokenizes it, and brings the token to the blockchain, one can trust the value of the token by verifying the origin and its harvesting. With the weeveOS functionality tokenized data turns into a digital asset as the value is determinable.
Weeve Platform
Data tokenization is only one aspect to the empowering of the Economy of Things. Tokens need to be made tradable through concepts known as marketplaces. In a machine-to-machine economy supply and demand of tokenized IoT data needs to be escrowed like in the real world: Sellers offer their tokenized data and buyers search for the good in exchange for some other token.
The Weeve platform facilitates the creation, management and orchestration of marketplaces. It empowers individuals, enterprises or governmental bodies to set up, curate or join existing marketplaces. The purpose of the platform is to reduce the time-to-market into the Economy of Things. The Weeve Platform provides a base layer for the EoT-commercialization of IoT data and the design of blockchain-based marketplace applications and services.
IoT devices connect through a message-queuing broker (running the MQTTS protocol designed by the team) to the platform’s gateway, which handles all the communicative tasks. The gateway provides secure device management featuring secure key management, access control, accounting, real-time status checks and trusted firmware updates.
The Weeve Platform also harnesses testified smart contracts. A testimony is a novel concept developed by the team to cryptographically prove the truthfulness and integrity of the data. This is a stepping stone to assess the quality and value of the data. For example, when the marketplace policy requires testified data, the gateway will drop data offers not satisfying the marketplace policy. In the same vein, it will drop the data from making it tradeable, if the testimony is incorrect, as this implies the data was tampered with and its quality cannot be assured.
‘Weeve’s marketplaces are blockchain-agnostic.’
We would like to stress that Weeve’s marketplaces are blockchain-agnostic. The Weeve Platform will support a rich set of prevailed and future emerging Blockchain technologies (e.g., Ethereum, Hyperledger, etc.) and consensus protocols (proof-of-stake, proof-of-authority), as they vary in their suitability for applications. This way, the greatest amount of technological openness is assumed.
*The Weeve Network will be released soon — stay tuned.
Interested in a deeper technological dive? Our White Paper is found here.
Business Model
Weeve’s business model is based on usage fees (e.g. per marketplace curation, transaction, or platform use). A portion of the fees is allocated to developers for their contributions to the Weeve Platform.
We will be releasing a detailed Business Model in our soon-to-be-published Business White Paper — stay tuned.
Weeve (Simplified)Roadmap
The below roadmap is a simplified version of what the Weeve team entails to accomplish by 2019. We will be releasing a separate Medium article dedicated to a full Technical and Business roadmap that clearly outlines how Weeve will empower the Economy of Things.
Phase 1: Q2 2017
- Weeve (eciotify GmbH) is found by Harald Zapp and Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek
- Patent 1 filed: MQTTS protocol for secure IoT communication
Phase 2: Q3 2017
- Patent 2 filed: Testified Smart Contract to ensure the attestation of IoT harvested and processed IoT data
- The development of weeveOS, an IoT-to-Blockchain Operating System designed for the Internet of Things, leveraging the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to establish a secure-by-design gateway
Phase 3: Q4 2017
- Weeve undergoes a rebrand from its former eciotify
- ConsenSys jump on board to offer advisory council
- WeeveOS network principles are based on cryptoeconomic mechanisms that incentivize the curation of stable and high-standard data marketplaces and to prevent the trade of fake (unattested) data
Phase 4: Q1 2018
- Release of our MVP to select testing parties
- Release of weeveOS to select testing parties
- Designing of weeve marketplace registries, centralized and decentralized validation and protocol interfaces
Phase 5: Q2 2018
- Development of the weeve business model enabling users to participate in weeve marketplaces and effectively the Economy of Things.
- Stay tuned for the release of our various partners that will begin to build the weeve ecosystem
- Weeve token event
Phase 6: Q3 2018
- Community invitation to the weeve MVP and weeveOS beta version
Phase 7: Q4 2018
- Release of the open-source IoT-to-Blockchain Operating System weeveOS
- Launching weeve network beta and API for community developments.
Phase 8: Q1 2019
- Continued development of the weeveOS
- Launch of the Weeve Network with selected strategic partners
Phase 9: 2019+
- The release of the Weeve Platform that will empower the trade of IoT data and therefore empower a just Economy of Things that boasts strong game theoretic incentive mechanisms to ensure stable data driven marketplaces
Please note: The above is a stepping stone timeline to empower the Economy of Things and aims to provide our growing community of interested supporters a guidelines as to what we aim to achieve and when. We will release a more detailed roadmap in the coming weeks.
Call to Community
Moreover, we also believe the weeveOS needs to be open to the Blockchain community, as developing an Operating System for the Blockchain with wide-range deployment needs joint efforts by the community. Only when the community adapts the technology, a prolonged and continuous developed of a decentralized Blockchain ecosystem is achievable. An Operating System secure by design and peer-reviewed by the community is a gateway to connect more devices to the Blockchain and enable novel and innovative applications.
Follow the links below to become part of our community. Here, you will be able to directly ask the weeve team questions as well as engage with other community members who are as excited about Weeve as you and I are.
Contact us
If you are interested in reaching out to the Weeve team for any other reason, drop us an email at info@weeve.network. We look forward to all future connections.
References
1 Gartner.com. (2017). Gartner Says 8.4 Billion Connected. [online] Available at: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917 [Accessed 17 Jan. 2018].
2 Ericsson (2015). Ericsson Mobility Report. [online] Stockholm: Ericsson AB. Available at: https://www.ericsson.com/assets/local/news/2016/03/ericsson-mobility-report-nov-2015.pdf [Accessed 21 Dec. 2017].
3 McKinsey Global Institute (2018). Mapping the Value Beyond the Hype. The Internet of Things. [online] McKinsey & Company. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-the-value-of-digitizing-the-physical-world [Accessed 31 Nov. 2017].
4 In our terminology, IoT sensors measure the current which is some form of data; opening or closing a relay to turn on/off charging is also some form of data. We use the term data as an umbrella for tokenizable information.
This article is Part 1 of a two-part overview on Weeve. Click here for part 2.
