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The Blockchain-Enabled Intelligent IoT Economy

Let's explore the intersection and interaction between AI, IoT and Blockchain: The IoT and consumer hardware industry have seen multiple failures and a few exits over the last 18 months (while the B2B side has been doing a bit better) yet some criticism has been made for the industry to slow down.
Francesco Corea

How Blockchain is changing IoT

  • Securing data better: The first one is indeed the concept of storing data securely. We know that blockchain protocols are not designed to heavily store data (they are indeed ledgers, not databases), but they can provide “control points” to monitor data access (Outlier Ventures, 2018).
  • Creating the right incentive structure: A blockchain can create the right incentive structure to share IoT data, which is something we are currently missing. Cross-sectional data have been proved to have the most disruptive impact when applied across different industries, but the problem of how and why sharing data in the first place remains. Blockchain (and tokenization) can be used to solve this economic dilemma, and once data are shared can be more easily validated, authenticated and secured.
  • Creating a network of computers: Distributing the workload and implementing parallel computing tasks is something it is usually attributed to new AI or High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications, but a blockchain would be essential in this development for authenticating and validating the single nodes of those networks. Some companies that are working on this problem are Golem, iExec, Onai, Hadron, Hypernet, DeepBrain Chain, etc.