Latest Updates from the founders
Tech-side
Since our Testnet Beta “Epic” release in August, we have been developing new features focused on sub-chains, which we will debut in November for our Mainnet Preview. In parallel, we have invested time in “quality weeks” where we intensively improve/clean the existing code base. Finally, we are continuing research across various topics — for example, we just published a paper on a PBFT enhancement. Regarding the latest academic paper.
Conference & Events
IoTeX will be premiering our sharing economy proof of concept with NKN at the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP) summit in London on October 16–17. We will also be hosting some local events in the Bay Area, Toronto, and China in the coming weeks.
Partnerships
Our latest partnership is with NKN, which we announced today! We are working with several other new development and ecosystem partners, which we will announce when we are able to disclose more details.
Campaigns
We will have a new campaign early next week, which will give our community further opportunities to interact with our Testnet — and be rewarded for it! Closer to our Mainnet Preview launch in November, we will also run community campaigns to bring attention to our innovations.
Selected Questions
Q: What do you think about EthereumClassic?
Raullen: I personally don’t pay attention to ETC too closely, but I heard about they started to brand themselves as a blockchain for IoT, which surprises me. I don’t have the up-to-date knowledge regarding ETC technology and my impression is that it almost looks exactly alike ethereum which apparently is not optimum for IoT applications in terms of its architecture and underlying primitives. So my guess is that it won’t get there.
Q: Does the team have any plan on running the testnet with various reward to attract more attention of the general public?
Jing: Sure. We are planning various campaigns and bounty programs for our community to join the Testnet. Both developers and general users are welcome to participate in the programs and got rewards. We will release Testnet final version in Nov and there will be many testing phases before mainnet launch, pls stay tuned!
Q: What are the industries that are expected to be benefitted from IoT applications and what might be the forecasted market of IoT be in 4–5 years?
Qevan: Many Industries will benefit from the growth of IoT, including Industrial Manufacturing, Transportation and Logistics, and Utilities, Healthcare, Energy, Retail, Government, Smart Home, Insurance, etc.
Some widely quoted prediction statistics are:
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The global IoT market will grow to $457B by 2020, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.5%.
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Discrete Manufacturing, Transportation and Logistics, and Utilities will lead all industries in IoT spending by 2020, averaging $40B each.
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Bain predicts B2B IoT segments will generate more than $300B annually by 2020, including about $85B in the industrial sector.
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Internet Of Things Market To Reach $267B By 2020 according to Boston Consulting Group.
Q: Congratulations on your recent membership of the IoT Alliance. May I know what informed your becoming a member of that body?
2) The Alliance, as we all know, is a body loaded to the hilt in terms of clout in the global IoT industry and in resources, what plans do you have to leverage your membership for the overall growth of IoTeX in general and improve the lot the $IOTX ‘hodler’?
Jing: That’s a good question. We decided to join the Trusted IoT Alliance recently as they formalized several committees (marketing, technology, etc.) that seek to make real impact. We feel the IoTeX project is mature enough to contribute in a real way, and we are excited to work on the broader challenges in the blockchain & IoT space with other reputable companies.
To answer your second question, the actual goal of the Trusted IoT Alliance is to further the understanding and adoption of the blockchain & IoT sector as a whole. While all of the Alliance members drive forward on their respective research and development, each member will also contribute to the Alliance’s goals. Ultimately, success in the Alliance will lead to bigger and better things for all blockchain & IoT projects. With the Alliance, we will work on joint proofs of concept and contribute code/insights in a “sandbox” approach. One of the launching partners of TIoT is Cisco, and we have been invited to attend their Blockchain conference in Singapore later this month and discuss on the applications of IoT and blockchain, this kind of engagement will help increase the publicity and visibility of IoTeX project and open the door for us to work with industry leaders directly.
Q: What kind of functionality do you make for developers to build useful dapps on IoTeX? How are you going to get many great dapps? What kind of support do you expect from the community, if they are non-developer and if they are developer?
Qevan: Glad we have this question focusing on the DApp development. IoTeX is a public blockchain with advanced features. The DApps we expect are different from DApps on other blockchains like Ethereum. For example, we, in the future, will have privacy as one of the main big advantages. We’d like developers to work on privacy-centric DApps that could not be done on other blockchains. For non-developers, we would like them to understand and advocate for our advantages and vision.
Q: Iot is about the interconnectivity of connectable devices. And in such a situation there’s a deliberate design for interoperability based on the seamless distribution of data between such connected devices. Now, tell me, in specific, nontechnical terms:
- What infrastructures AND devices IoTeX have or are planning to develop in order to prevent the Scarry issue of data theft or breach.
- If I’m a noob IOT consumer with a data breach issue, can I commission IOTEX for a solution? And how?
Qevan: Let me start with the first questions: Data theft/manipulation is a big issue in the IoT world. Experts estimate there will be a $5 billion black market for IoT data (both stolen and fake data) by 2025. The intersection of blockchain & IoT is a perfect candidate to address this issue. Regarding infrastructure, this is the core offering of IoTeX’s blockchain platform. We apply our academic and industry expertise in infrastructure security at Google, Uber, Bosch, etc. to ensure our blockchain is secure. Regarding devices, you should think not about the actual devices but the embedded chips/manufacturers. Certain devices and connectivity types (e.g., NB-IoT, cellular, WiFi, LoRa) all have different security requirements/capabilities. Blockchain cannot directly increase the security of hardware, but one thing it can do is ensure the authenticity of these devices.
And for the second question: Yes — not only does IoTeX provide high security through our sophisticated protocol design, but we are also very focused on privacy. Our goal is to develop an ecosystem where consumers can fully own their data. This means that they can choose to keep some data completely private, other data can be shared with trusted parties, and even other data can be sold. Blockchain provides great optionality and security for consumers.
Q: iotx mainnet token will be utility token but with core consensus being roll-dpos lets be honest that even now majority of people is holding the token to possibly get staking rewards in the future so the token even though maybe unintentionally will partly be a financial asset that will generate digital income. Do you see any regulatory problems with that (even though it would be silly to think that government would disallow pos consensus because of rewards — interesting situation) ? Do you see this possibly hybrid token in a sense cross pathing its use — some will speculate on this as a security asset making it volatile and as a utility token stability may be preferred, any thoughts on that?
Jing: It is true that there are multiple segments of token holders — some are speculative day-traders, some are potential delegates/block producers, and in the future, many will be users of the utility token to run transactions on IoTeX. We do not see any major regulatory hurdles that are specific to IoTeX — we are also curious to see where global regulators will land in regards to “are utility tokens as a security”. However, we feel that even though some may see our token as only a form of digital income, they are still providing a service to the network in exchange for their mining rewards. Those that receive rewards are fundamentally maintaining the IoTeX network, similar to how other service providers help keep traditional companies running. At the end of the day, we cannot focus too much on the speculative nature of our token as this is out of our control — we just focus on making sure that our token has the maximum utility.
Q: How tight is the team? Are they mainly related to work or is the team strengthening the overall bonds between each other, maybe spending time outside work, a picnic for example? What is the environment and strength of relationships among the team members?
Jing: Corporate culture is working hard, play hard. We have a flat structure and very collaborative working style. For example, we have a war room for teams to work very tight before every testnet launch. After successful launch, we organize offsite team building to celebrate and have fun and do internal hackathon to debug and brainstorm new next release goals. Our team members have close relationship like family, we support each other, got inspired from each other, sometimes also challenge each other when get into work.
Q: How did ETHSanFrancisco go? What are the main benefits of such events for IoTeX to keep moving forward for their goal?
Jing: The ETHSanFrancisco and SF blockchain Week attracted 1000+ developers and over 10K general public to join, it’s a successful event. Both Raullen and I were invited to speak at the Global Blockchain Forum and had very meaningful conversations with peer project founders and investors. We discussed directly with Ethereum core team on the development of Plasma and discussing on the implementation, we also gave many of our inputs on how we improve the sidechain system design on our IoTeX public chain. At the infrastructure level, we will have more collaboration with top tech team to accelerate the progress for each public chain adoption. Through the event We got more people to know IoTeX and created many new opportunities for partnerships/developer adoption, and we got many talented candidates who are passionate about our vision and want to join us.
Q: I’m an aspiring IOT Blockprenuer,
- Is it possible to deploy my project ( complete with chain and tokens) on the IoTeX’s blockchain?
- What benefit do I get in deploying my project on IoTeX’s chain compared to that of Ethereum’s? And
- What’s the official procedures for initiating such deployment?
- Do you have plans to introduce community vetting and contributions (in return for a percentage of the tokens)?
Raullen:
- Yes! On testnet now!
- faster tx, 0 tx fee, privacy (yet-to-come)
- you can try right now, testnet is open to everyone so we are good
- Yes!
Q: After joining the Trusted IoT Alliance, which also includes such a giant as Cisco. And Cisco also has a division that develops IoT and the like.
Can we hope for mutual cooperation with this giant?))
The founders thought about what specialization and what topic would this cooperation concern?
Most likely it will be some narrow segment of the IoT “market” …
Can we hear any words about hypothetical collaboration with Cisco?
Qevan: For the first question — Definitely yes. We would be glad to work with Cisco, Bosch, Siemens, Samsung and so on who has already well-established in IoT industry, and indeed we are already in talk with some of them, and will start with POCs and pilots, which will be pushed to production if goes really well. Keep in mind that these giants are very slow in every step. Totally different pace from what we are in the crypto world 
And for your second question: They concern about their brands so they are very conservative about what to do with disruptive technologies like blockchain. At the same time, they do want to try some of these things out. So after our tremendous conversations with many giants, POCs and pilots are usually easier to start with.
Specifically for Cisco, I hope we could and we are working towards this direction. The collaboration we want (also these giants want) is real working together to either building a useful product or addressing existing problems in their scenarios.