Industry 4.0: Technology convergence towards a decentralized ecosystem
The digital ecosystem based around Web 3.0 as we call it is failing. The system has been unable to meet the needs of individual privacy, security and regulatory demands. There has been an emergence of monopolistic control over global information and communities’ networks. Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are recent examples of this. Today no one knows what happened to personal data they provided to Myspace and Orkut, which no longer legally exists to face the scrutiny.
Technology evolution is creating an unimaginable amount of data. Combining these with automation, biotech, analytics and machine learning advances is giving immense power and control to a few large companies in the “legacy” Web 3.0 ecosystem.
In the new industry 4.0 Ecosystem data generated through IoT, biological world and the personalized web are managed by a decentralized blockchains systems, automated by artificial intelligence, and incentivised using digital currencies like crypto-tokens. So to put a broad classification of industry 4.0 Ecosystem, it is open, hyper-personalized, decentralized, automated, tokenized and democratized by nature.
In Industry 4.0, blockchain plays a key role to enable an open, distributed and decentralized foundation. It has a transformative impact on how the ecosystem leverages confluence of biotech, AI, IoT, ML, AR etc.
The impact of this new 4.0 ecosystem could be profound and while the Finance industry has been quick to adopt some of these trends, let’s look at three select use cases across industries of this evolution. Will keep a detailed diverse industry discussion for later.
eGovernance, centralised blockchain-based identity management
A government digitizing traditional identity management for citizens is inevitable in the future. The current system is difficult to manage and lacks flexibility and agility to cater for varying needs of people and businesses. Such initiative combining biometrics, blockchain and automation will deliver several benefits across Government, citizens and private players:
· Delivering system-wide efficiencies through better integrated ecosystem bringing in greater transparency and reduced corruption
· Fast track the overall digitalization agenda and simplified online transaction and adoption of smart contracts
· Provide massive benefits for natural disaster recovery, fight against crimes like human trafficking, identity theft, benefit frauds etc…
Today customer identity and KYC are critical needs for financial institutions. Each institution collects KYC information on its own, often repeatedly and on its own data standards. KYC/AML contributes almost 20 % of the cost of running a banking operation. Blockchain-based identity management systems can be used by banks and financial institution for their KYC /AML needs delivering exponential benefits. Here are two interesting examples
· Bitnation ( https://tse.bitnation.co/ )
· The Dubai land department (DLD).
An excellent read on this topic at cryptomorrow
Today Web 2.0 legacy has created multiple authentication and authorization mechanisms, often confusing, controlled by few players with no user control on the amount of data being shared.
The future ecosystem needs an integrated approach to talk across devices, machines and web while still giving privacy control to the user. Hence, a biometrics and blockchain based system with decentralised, secure Identity system can be leveraged giving users control to determine who sees what information. This can potentially replace several web 2.0 authentication systems that have emerged globally and within certain countries. Here are some interesting live examples to explore.
· www.2way.io
Industry 4.0 Smart Supply chain
Convergence of technology in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem can bring in disruptive transformation in the entire supply chain across industries. There has been considerable work in this space converging advances in IoT, blockchain and data analytics with several in-flight projects.
Provenance, a U.K. software start-up, is using blockchain technology to establish the authenticity of the food, luxury goods etc. Leveraging mobile, blockchain and open data, Provenance enables retailers and producers to open product data, track the journey of goods, and empower customers with access to knowledge like the authenticity of the organic food, sustainably sourced, the authenticity of designer labels and slavery-free products. In one use case, it takes information from IoT sensors and records it on the blockchain to track the food from farm to fork. There are several other interesting case studies at https://www.provenance.org/case-studies
A Finnish organisation Kouvala Innovation Oy is attempting a true integration of Industry 4.0 technologies in logistics. Pallets with RFID tags would communicate their logistic data like destination, shipment date, priority etc… Carriers that are blockchain-based applications would connect for the right to move that load. The RFID tag would award a smart contract to the carrier that meets a shipper’s requirements. Then as the shipment travels, the blockchain would continue to track the shipment. More details at https://www.kinno.fi/en/smartlog
Global registry for academic degrees and certifications:
With every increasing globalization and cross-border movement, the need for recording and independent verification of various certificate ranging from Academic degrees, Resume authenticity, Product certification, Document authenticity etc.has never been felt more.
There has been a significant increase in academic certification frauds driven by counterfeiting as well as flaws in institutions’ systems. Recording and verifying degrees, certificates and critical documents can be costly and time-consuming for academia and businesses alike. However, if certificates were put on blockchain, the authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation of the certificate would be guaranteed as blockchain cannot be compromised.
One example of this is the University of Nicosia (Cyprus) which has been issuing academic certificates whose authenticity can be verified through Bitcoin blockchain since 2014 (Link — University of Nicosia digital certificates)
Recently MIT started a blockchain based academic certification. This started as an incubation project by the Media Lab Learning Initiative, which builds an ecosystem for creating, sharing, and verifying blockchain based educational certificates. Digital certificates are registered on the Bitcoin blockchain, cryptographically signed, and tamper proof. This can be further extended to build wider certification and document authentication. Read more here.Link: MIT Media Lab Digital certification initiative
Below are two other examples to explore further that stand out
· http://www.appii.io/
So are your technology investments enabling your business transition to Industry 4.0 ecosystem? Feel free to share your thoughts, views insights in the comments.
Written By
Linkedin, Twitter Puneet Goenka
Opinions expressed here are my own and not the views of my employer, client or any Institutions
