The Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad industry, comprised of various types of IoT devices, connectivity standards, and applications. The IoT also spans across multiple “vertical” use cases: smart homes, vehicles, supply chain, wearables, industrial IoT, and much more. While the breadth and variety of IoT may seem daunting, there are overlapping “horizontal” capabilities that drive today’s IoT industry. One of these capabilities is tracking the geolocation of our assets, our loved ones, and ourselves.
Today, geolocation is a commodity provided by the Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite-based radio navigation system owned and operated by the United States Air Force. It is a global satellite system that provides geolocation and time information to a GPS receiver anywhere on Earth. While GPS has become the global standard, it is actually easily hackable and suffers from relatively weak signals. The end-to-end trust that IoTeX seeks to provide to various industries requires other alternatives for geolocations, especially in use cases where geolocation must be 100% guaranteed (i.e., self-driving cars, package deliveries, smart cities).
This is why IoTeX is excited to partner with XYO, the world’s first decentralized geolocation oracle powered by a human-powered P2P network. XYO enables the virtual world to request cryptographically-secured data from the physical world, such as location data, audio, and temperature. XYO is delivering trust to location data and will be a great option for IoTeX developers to use in their decentralized applications (DApps).
XYO started as a location-based consumer product business focused on getting Bluetooth and GPS tracking beacons out into the world. XYO now has over 1 million location beacon devices circulating around the world and has created the single largest network of Bluetooth & GPS devices in the world. They have extended this existing infrastructure to the blockchain, allowing anyone to determine if an object is at specific geolocation (X, Y coordinates). If it is, one can set up applications that execute transactions in a smart contract based on the guaranteed geolocation.
XYO’s Geomining Kit with location trackers
Over the coming months, we will explore how to sync XYO’s geolocation capabilities with the IoTeX blockchain, allowing IoTeX developers to leverage XYO’s geolocation network. By mid-2019, we will be able to settle geolocation transactions from XYO’s network on the IoTeX blockchain, enabling new “geolocation-as-a-service” capabilities in the IoTeX network. Stay tuned for more announcements regarding our future partnership roadmap, and see the official press release here .