Companies including Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Foxconn, and Gemalto have joined a collaborative effort with a number of startups to develop a blockchain-based Internet of Things protocol.
Participating start-ups in the initiative included Ambisafe, BitSE, Chronicled, ConsenSys, Distributed, Filament, Hashed Health, Ledger, Skuchain, and Slock.it.
The first step in the collaboration saw participating companies meet at the New Horizons: Blockchain x IoT Summit in December last year. The initial meeting included presentations from blockchain and IoT focused startups on their established use cases, industry findings, and identification of common needs.
Blockchain is claimed to be a tamper-proof distributed record of transactions that will be maintained on a network of computers connected through the internet and will be secured using advanced cryptography.
As per the consortium, blockchain technology can provide additional security and identity management features to applications based on internet of things.
The newly formed group discussed established use cases, industry findings and identification of common needs and have also agreed that security trust, identity, and registration and verification would be the cornerstones of any common protocol.
The group also stated that there is a need for integration and interoperability across multiple chip types, communication protocols, proprietary platforms, cloud service providers, and blockchain systems.
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The formation of the consortium will help in evolving the scope and implementation of smart contracts and a protocol layer across several major blockchain systems.
Bosch Software Innovations chief alliance officer Dirk Slama said, “We are seeing tremendous potential for the application of blockchain in industrial use cases.
“Being able to create a tamper-proof history of how products are manufactured, moved and maintained in complex value networks with many stakeholders is a critical capability, e.g. for quality assurance and prevention of counterfeits.
“This must be supported by a shared blockchain infrastructure and an integrated Internet of Things protocol.”
BNY Mellon Blockchain head Alex Batlin said: “Blockchain has the power to improve resiliency and efficiency in a fully connected world.
“What’s missing today is a solution that provides trusted, tamper-proof guarantees for any title deed, public record, compliance event, or transaction, building on the way paper documents are used currently.”
