The world is rightfully excited about the potential of blockchain — the development of which some have compared to the advent of the internet. This decentralized, immutable record will soon allow us to safely conduct a variety of different transactions from virtually anywhere in the world — like a digital ledger in the sky.
A Gartner report by Nick Jones, VP and Distinguished Analyst, entitled “Top Applications for Blockchain for IoT in 2018 and 2019” caught my eye recently because of its pragmatic assessment that blockchain isn’t ready to be the solution for every IoT problem, while also noting that blockchain is poised for immediate use in some key IoT scenarios.
However, the Gartner report didn’t discount the significance of blockchain, it merely posited that the technology is so new that it will take time before its value proposition will be fully realized in the IoT space.
The part that really caught my attention, though, was Gartner’s identification of four technological opportunities that are ripe for blockchain IoT implementation today:
From my perspective, Gartner really hit the mark with this prediction, because our Atonomi Network will make use of blockchain technology to implement three of these opportunities (1, 3, and 4) and could certainly secure a system addressing opportunity number 2.
Here’s a quick look at how we are building our solution to take advantage of three of the four areas identified by Gartner as being the technological sweet spots for IoT and blockchain opportunities:
And what about that other opportunity identified in the Gartner report, “Warranty and Usage Recording”? Glad you asked. The Atonomi Network would be an ideal security solution for the future viability of warranty and usage apps. Because blockchain is immutable and can be accessed remotely on any server, it holds tremendous potential for documenting these services. Through the Atonomi Network, we will be able to provide better security to the IoT devices that are involved in capturing and recording such data.
We believe that IoT can never reach its full potential without robust security that’s precisely crafted for the resource-constrained devices of the IoT. This is why we are creating Atonomi.
Thanks for reading,
Vaughan