Ruff Chain: first IoT blockchain firm to cooperate with an industrial giant
Ruff has formally announced recently that it has formally entered a cooperation agreement with Schneider and both parties will conduct a range of cooperative business in IIoT. As the first IoT blockchain firm cooperating with an industrial giant, what technical strengths does it possess indeed? What on earth has the integration of IoT with blockchain brought to us?
The Internet of Things (IoT) came into practice when the US company Xerox launched its online coke vending machine in 1990. However, the concept of IoT was not proposed until MIT Prof. Kevin Ashton raised it in 1999 for the first time. As an integral element of the new generation of IT and the third wave of global IT development, IoT is actually the extension of internet applications. And what real benefits will blockchain technology, as a brand new decentralized technology, bring us after it is integrated with IoT? Let’s look at the core pain spots of IoT.
The first pain spot of IoT technology application is data.
The management and maintenance data of IoT equipment as well as data acquisition of audiences’ information have caused immeasurable costs pressure for producers, operators and even consumers. By contrast, the P2P distributed architecture of data transmission and storage in the blockchain technology, and the data encryption and verification mechanisms under distributed environments, may eliminate this pain spot and also ensure data immutability. It is joyful for producers, operators and consumers as well to reduce the costs of data maintenance, management and operation.
The second pain spot is the security issue of IoT data.
The burst of Snowden incident has directed much attention to network information security. Either network operators or governmental agencies may often analyze user data without approval for various reasons, which seriously infringed on users’ own benefits. The decentralization of blockchain, by contrast, may effectively protect user data and privacy. Alongside its strict encryption, the users’ own benefits will be powerfully guaranteed. Moreover, the blockchain technology may guarantee IoT transaction security. Different device holders may directly transact through encryption protocols, and even conduct settlements through encrypted digital tokens.
These two core pain spots alone may present the urgent demand of IoT for blockchain technology, but issues such as high R&D costs of IoT applications, test complexity and scarcity of professional talents have raised the threshold for IoT application development. Nonetheless, it must be done.
What Ruff is doing is to cross this threshold.
Since its establishment in 2014, it has focused on IoT, and developed Ruff OS 2 years later, which is the world’s first IoT OS based on the JavaScript development language and supports cross-platform code running. This has provided an absolutely open, efficient and quick IoT app development platform for software development, and hardware can be operated by just calling the program library, significantly lowering the threshold of IoT app development and also providing a standardized IoT OS for IoT layer access. So far, over ten thousand developers have, through Ruff, rapidly deployed apps to hardware equipment and rapidly completed IoT app development, really making IoT app development concise and efficient.
Ruff is not complacent with Ruff OS.
It is a long-reserved view of its core developer — Roy Li: technical support, if impossible to be directly applied and implemented, would be of little significance, no matter how excellent or powerful it is. Thus, the Ruff Chain team was established in late 2017, focusing on the R&D of global public blockchain of IoT, deeply integrating IoT with blockchain, starting with IoT access, supporting IoT transformation of multiple industries and multiple scenarios, and realizing data acquisition and access so as to truly help traditional enterprises transform into IoT-based ones. It may even rapidly send value data of settlements at the IoT layer onto the blockchain, so as to realize secured and stable operation of data in the public blockchain, and meet decentralization, immutability and consistency needs of data. The release of sidechain has also enabled clients to send data onto the blockchain and release tokens in a more efficient, simpler and relaxed way.
By March 2018, Ruff had realized IoT solutions in many fields, such as industries, energy, agriculture, internet of vehicles and smart city. The global electrical leader — Schneider has signed a cooperation agreement with Ruff. It shows recognition of Ruff’s strength by Schneider to have innovative cooperation service with this 80-year-old global top 500 enterprise from France. Asia’s largest electronic channel — WPG Holdings Limited also cooperates with Ruff in chips, which also shows its recognition of Ruff’s high practicability of hardware technology. As Microsoft’s cloud computing-based OS, Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure) has undoubted hard power, and it is now cooperating with Ruff in IIoT cloud, which undoubtedly shows its positive view on Ruff’s IoT access capacity.
Ruff is now in a rise period. Its cooperation with giants affirms Ruff’s powerful technical strength, and also displays its great prospects. From the development platform to the implemented deep integration scheme, Ruff has always been making efforts to realize rapid IoT transformation of traditional industries. It is believed that, under the leadership of Ruff, as an industry pioneer and wind vane, truly universal interconnection and data on the chain are just round the corner.
