A new alliance has recently been formed focusing on integrating blockchain technology with the wider Internet of Things (IoT) field with their, somewhat still in development website, stating:
“The primary purpose of the Alliance is to leverage the blockchain and other security technologies to introduce trust into IoT, to leverage the automation potential of trusted IoT sensors with smart contracts, to evaluate the ROI of use cases enabled by trust, and to create common open source methods in the smart contracts as a system of lego blocks to achieve compounding growth in the space.”
No members are yet listed, but Stephan Tual has stated Slockit is a founding member. Another member is Cisco, with Anoop Nannra, a technology strategist at Cisco, stating:
“Cisco is leading the formation of the Trusted IoT Alliance, focused on ensuring blockchain interoperability in IoT applications, regardless of underlying blockchain platform.
This effort will help accelerate the adoption of blockchain solutions in IoT—ranging from managing and reporting mining site data, manufacturing supply chain, transportation data security, oil and gas operations, and energy production – all the way to insurance risk management.
These types of applications are often disrupting decades-old business processes and technical workflows. And they all have to work together to maximize value.”
IoT is one of the more exciting application of blockchain technology generally and smart contracts specifically because it can allow machines to directly and autonomously transact as well as, for the first time, to hold, transfer and control value.
A number of such initiatives are already being piloted and prototyped, with the car industry taking an initiative, but also agriculture, supply chains, energy, and many others.
The Trusted IoT Alliance is now seemingly trying to pool the resources of various industries into a framework that can more easily integrate blockchain technology with industrial machines.
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