Today, Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Gemalto, U.S. Bank along with Bitse, Chronicled, ConsenSys, Ledger, Skuchain, Slock.it, HCM International of Foxconn Group, IOTA, Oaken Innovations, Qtum, Chain of Things, Big Chain DB announced the official launch of the Trusted IoT Alliance, a group of companies united to catalyze the development of a blockchain-enabled, trusted Internet of Things (IoT).
The mission of the Trusted IoT Alliance is to bring companies together to develop and set the standard for an open source blockchain protocol to support IoT technology in major industries worldwide.
The Alliance offers an inclusive membership model and annual events to connect Fortune 5000 enterprises, software developers, and blockchain technology companies. Its membership is focused on ‘working together to advance IoT and blockchain’ by leading pilots, publishing open source code, and coordinating standards and reference architecture. Members of the group have already published a common API to register ‘things’ to both Hyperledger and Enterprise Ethereum blockchain networks. The Alliance plans to fund small grants to support open source development and is reviewing proposals from IoT and blockchain technologists.
“A big part of realizing the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies will be linking these secure virtual systems to secure physical IoT systems. The Alliance’s vision is to support the creation of a secure, scalable, interoperable, and trusted IoT ecosystem and to become a key forum for enabling rapid development of mature IoT enabled blockchain use cases and specifications.”
Key Facts:
- Founding members of the Trusted IoT Alliance have been cooperating informally since December 2016.
- For more than a decade, enterprise technology companies have worked to develop standards for IoT security, interoperability, scalability, and identity. Proprietary technology and competing interests made a truly open network difficult to develop. Open source is widely recognized as the solution to the development of robust IoT standards. However, organizing consortia between major industry players is complex. The Trusted IoT Alliance is a solution to both technological standards and the problem of collaboration between Fortune 5000 and startup companies.
- The Alliance will house intellectual property and open-source tools and standards that support trusted digital identities for IoT-connected products. These tools and standards will allow enterprises to represent physical world “things” and “event logs” on a decentralized blockchain system.
- The goal of the Alliance is the creation of a trusted IoT ecosystem that links cryptographic and registrant identities, along with metadata, to give objects the equivalent of digital, transferable “birth certificates,” that can be inventoried and managed across blockchain networks.
- An object or “thing” could be an internet-connected machine or product, ranging from a car to a drone, package, sneaker, lithium-ion battery, or energy meter. On top of this trusted IoT platform, the group sees potential to automate business logic through smart contracts and building a thriving Machine-2-Machine economy.
- The Alliance is blockchain agnostic and will support integration across any open source enterprise blockchain or distributed ledger technology platform that has potential to become a backend for widespread commercial and industrial adoption. The Alliance aims to foster interoperability and interworking across blockchain platforms, applications, and in doing so remove barriers to broad-scale adoption of blockchain technology.
The Trusted IoT Alliance has named Zaki Manian, a Co-Founder of Skuchain, as the organization’s executive director with current operating board member roles held by representatives of the other founding member companies: Bosch, Chronicled, Cisco, and Gemalto.
Below are a few executive quotes from member companies on the vision and mission of the Trusted IoT Alliance:
“We are proud to be a founding member of the Trusted IoT Alliance and partnering with other leading companies to drive and support enterprise standards at the intersection of blockchain and IoT. Blockchain and IoT together create a “sweet spot” that form an Internet of Value which allows secure value flow across a range of industry segments. The Alliance is promoting interoperability which is a key factor that drives broad-scale technology adoption. This consortium will assist innovators across industries to develop transformative applications.”
“The Trusted IoT Alliance will power the machine economy by setting standards and specifications for global interoperability. BigchainDB is proud to join and support the Alliance as the decentralized data substrate for event logging and connecting immutable data to valuable assets.”
“We are very excited about the Trusted IOT Alliance and hope to see it emerge as a central hub to facilitate the discussion and collaboration between various stakeholders and technologies. With such an organization we are able to cross the chasm between different technologies, communities and even industries, and in turn enable the creation of new disruptive applications.”
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