How Blockchain Can Change the Future of IoT

Talking about IoT, imagine, my fridge knows my favourite Hagen Daz is running out. So it automatically orders from the ice-cream shop and pays it with my credit card. A few days later, my scale notices I gain too much weight so it immediately tells the fridge stop buying any more ice cream. Without any of my intervention, my devices are helping to balance my “foodieness” and health.

This is just a small example. Gartner has predicted that in 2020, over 20 billion of smart devices will be connected together that will transform everybody’s live.

Earlier today, our CEO Pavel sat on a panel at Smart IoT Singapore Conference discussing how blockchain can change the future of IoT. Blockchain and IoT are two of the biggest breakthrough in the past few years. But what if they get married?

With today’s Internet infrastructure, managing all these devices and maintaining network security will be a pain. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that 90% of organizations that implement the IoT will suffer an IoT-based breach of backend IT systems by the year 2017. Blockchain by design has very strong protection against data tampering. Every devices on the network can be identified with a unique ID and all activities are recorded. We have discussed about how blockchain can solve the internet infrastructure debt in our earlier blog.

Secondly, in a smart IoT network, devices have to communicate with each other. Smart contracts can be implemented so that your devices can follow the embedded logic to make decisions for you instantly or even negotiate with other devices based on your preset preferences.

And..How about the data?

Data collection is also one of the main activities in IoT. With the ambition of smart nations and smart cities, these data will be invaluable sources to optimize urban planning decisions but it will be massive. As such, a decentralized database will provide better scalability and performance, without a single point of failure.