Thank you to those who joined this Livestream AMA session! We had a great time answering your questions about our recent Mainnet Beta launch, DID, the Internet of Trusted Things, our products and future plans. We would like to provide our community with the summary and announce the winners of the most interesting questions chosen by the team.
Session participants
Livestream Video
See the timestamps under the video of the main topics and questions discussed in this AMA
Livestream Recap/Highlights
- Mainnet Beta Launch & project updates
- Decentralized Identity {DID} & the Internet of Trusted Things
Questions from the community:
Q1: Is there a way that IoTeX can protect user data on our mobile phones?
Q2: Monetizing data
Q3: What is your vision to reach mass adoption?
Q4: How will you keep up with technology and future competitors?
Q5: How big is the IoT space?
Q6: How can the community support IoTeX?
Q7: IoTeX x Supply Chain
Q8: Why do you think your idea needs the blockchain?
Q9: What plans do you have to help drive demand and scarcity for the IoTeX token?
Q10: IOTX available for US residents
Mainnet Beta Launch & project updates
We just got past the first phase of Mainnet Beta launch and looking forward to native staking. Since Beta was launched last week, we had implemented some very major upgrades for the network and it was executed without the disruption of our service. Also, we will have native staking, that will be enabled in the next week or so and after, we will shrink the block producing time to 5s to improve the user experience, as we have received some complaints from game and dapp developers, saying that 10s to finalize a block is too long, hence we made the improvement!
Speaking of native staking, you will be able to use IoPay to stake native tokens and the procedure will be very similar to the current one that we have. Shortly, we will publish a tutorial on staking with native IOTX , so make sure to review it. With this new change, you will now be able to adjust your voting buckets and add more tokens into existing ones + the maximum staking period has been increased to 3 years , as per the feedback we have received from our community.
The core features of Mainnet Beta are comprised of all the work that we have implemented since the launch of the Mainnet, back in April, 2019, and some of that includes:
- Expanding the Consensus Delegates Pool from 12 to 24 to 36
- Upgraded EVM
- Faster block production & TPS
- Optimized data storage — now running a node in our network is easy & cost-effective!
- New cross-chain transfers - we have a partnership with a stable coin called NUSD {Neutral Dollar}, that has launched about 4 months ago. NUSD is comprised of a basket of stable-coins, in order to eliminate the risk of high volatility of crypto-assets for users.
For the full list of features, please see our blog post .
DID
The decentralized identity that we are proposing is basically a self-sovereign digital identity that is fully managed and controlled by the user rather than a 3rd party or centralized service {example, your email address, social media, passport, health card/driving license}. You will no longer rely or depend on a company to host or manage your ID, with DID you will be responsible for your own data & identity, thus, you can be sure that your data cannot be manipulated or leaked in any way.
We plan to implement DID in our first IoT devices , for both the device and the user, that way you will be able to fully control your data {collected from that device} and manage it accordingly {share/publish, make private/lock, sell, etc.}. One of these products will be Ucam, so all the videos recorded will be visible to you only and those devices that YOU authorize.
What is unique about IoTeX’s DID is that we extended use cases {from the digital identity, that only covers a person), to devices, machines and humans in order to bring our vision of the Internet of Trusted Things to real life. This is an entire ecosystem to make peoples life’s better while ensuring their data is private and fully controlled by them! And in order to execute it, we want to make sure that not only those devices are made to be trusted, so that the consumers can trust the data they are collecting, but also., to protect user’s privacy and give them the control of ownership and deciding how and if to authorize the data access to any parties. This is how our vision is different from the current traditional IoT industry. Users will no longer have the downsides of living the connected lifestyle and they don’t have to give up their data, confidentiality, and privacy with IoTeX. Read more about IoTeX’s Internet of Trusted Things:
The Internet Of Trusted Things: IoTeX To Power Privacy-Focused Consumer Goods | Crypto Briefing
Questions from the community:
Q1: Is there a way that IoTeX can protect user data on our mobile phones?
DID {self-sovereign identity} is the first step to reach this ultimate goal, since you will be able to own the decide and the data it collect and decided whether or not you want to share it with anyone. In order to challenge the traditional industry and the big players in it, we need to start with something we can actually influence, for example, allocating and expanding the resources. As an idea, we can have DID in our IoPay app, so that it can be an ID provider to users, where they can create and manage their digital identities. In the future, users can pay attention to whether other apps are “Powered by IoTeX” and have a peace of mind, knowing that their data is safe.
In addition, since the creation and enforcement of regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, business practices are changing and a lot of IoT companies want to make themselves compliant but sometimes are unsure of the process, this is where our technology can be also used and we can become a technology enabler for them.
Q2: Monetizing data
We have actually established that all the data will be owned by users and for example with Ucam, we don’t really expect people to monetize it. Here’s a quick, real-life example: I am wearing a Fitbit band and its tracking my health data. Imagine IoTeX’s tech is built into it, so we can encrypt all the data and have a device & my identity on the edge. The moment the data gets generated and collected, its automatically encrypted and goes to the cloud {I can use AWS or Google for this}, so I fully control where and how the data is stored and I can delete it at any time. Then, I can have a trusted computing technology tap into the encrypted data and extract for example my sleeping patterns to review how healthy I am, run computation and provide me with the results. This is a very simple end-to-end flow without monetization and sacrificing our privacy. But, there are also lots of other types of data, such as home or health data that can be potentially monetized.
Q3: What is your vision to reach mass adoption?
We are working on a number of different initiatives to support the mass adoption, Vitamart is one of them. We work with a lot of different IoT manufacturers and their main problem is how to make their brand known to potential customers. With Vitamart, we want to introduce users to all these different types of brands, so they can start testing their products for free and provide feedback, in order for the manufacturer to improve their products.
When we started working on IoTeX we got approached by different IoT companies and over time, started working on Ucam, since we saw the need for secure smart home devices in the market. The overall industry at the moment, in our opinion, is not really going in the right direction, since users are uploading their data directly into the cloud servers which can be easily misused and compromised. With Ucam, we will be able to allow everyone to enjoy the data privacy and freedom.
Q4: How will you keep up with technology and future competitors?
First of all, we can not fight this battle alone so we definitely need other companies, technologies, projects, people to help us work on this. Secondly, there are copycats everywhere and there’s no way to eliminate it, so that’s why we just need to stick to what we are doing best! We are already a leading company among other projects in this market, so just need to keep pushing forward.
Q5: How big is the IoT space?
IoT is a very big space and the opportunities in it are endless. There are reports that have cited that IoT will be a 4–6B dollar market in the next few years . We think its actually bigger than that and it’s potentially a trillion-dollar market! Its market cap is comprised of all the furniture & smart home devices, infrastructure of the cities/smart cities, human, cars, machines, wearable devices, etc. Just for the cameras, in 5 years it will be a 100B market, and its just one of the devices in this market, which is huge!
Q6: How can the community support IoTeX?
We were lucky from the beginning since we had a very global community supporting IoTeX and now we need even more support from our communities since we are launching products. Our goal is to make these products available globally, so that all of our community members will have a priority of getting their hands on them and being the first ones to try. We will provide early access to our community members, so that’s one of the ways you can participate in our ecosystem. You can be not only the first one to try the products but also the one to introduce it to your local community!
Q7: IoTeX x Supply chain
One type of IoTeX’s products that can be used in this industry is definitely the Pebble Tracker, which is a supply chain oriented secure hardware that we are developing in-house. It tracks GPS location, temperature, humidity, air quality, motion vibration and other important metrics to provide the transparency in the supply chain industry. Since this industry is so broken and manual, using blockchain by itself is not the ultimate solution, the problems need to be addressed more holistically. Currently, the supply chain industry lacks digitalization of the data, it’s mostly manual and done by people — this is where a secure hardware device, like, Pebble Tracker, can help. Second, is the automation, which is partially implemented by centralized systems and is risky, since the data can be tampered with for the financial interests of the parties involved. Blockchain can be the ultimate solution for this and serve as a neutral decentralized place to automate things.
Q8: Why do you think your idea needs the blockchain?
Blockchain provides the fundamental trust many things that we are building and it’s very synergetic with IoT. Depending on the tech stack we will have, like cloud storage, trusted hardware, and even machine learning in the future, the difference is that blockchain provides identity and neutrality among things. Without it, we are just creating another centralized service like Google or Amazon, which doesn’t make sense.
Q9: What plans do you have to help drive the demand and scarcity for the IoTeX token?
Given the recent release of our Mainnet Beta, we are approaching a very stable blockchain for our developers, and have about 10 different applications already running on top of it, see this blog . When we collected feedback from developers of these Dapps, and asked why they chose to build on our blockchain and not Ethereum for example, they all said that it was very easy to build on top of IoTeX.
In terms of the token side, it is time for us to drive the real adoption, demand and usage of our token . We have a number of products in the pipeline, starting with Ucam, smart lock, Pebble Tracker and other products that will all utilize IoTeX’s infrastructure and use native IOTX for operation . We are also thinking of the next phase for IoTeX’s crypto-economics and are discussing a number of different ideas internally {ex. for every DID registered, one token is burned to manage the utility of the blockchain} to drive scarcity and demand for the token. Some projects are talking about micro-payment narrative, which we think would be a part of the things that we are doing, but the IoTeX token should be used to build up the foundation of the entire network, not just related to one component, such as DID. Once we reach a decision on this, we will be sure to share more details with our community, probably around the time when Ucam will be launched, which is mid-December 2019.
Q10: IOTX available for US residents
Since the US market is highly regulated, we don’t want to jeopardize anything for our token holders, so we are working with lawyers to make IOTX tokens available in the US market and will share progress on this later.