IOTA New Dawn Chrysalis Changes Announced

 Late to this but of interest, the IOTA Foundation, mentioned here a number of times,   was an interesting change in the idea of blockchains and how they were delivered.  I was impressed by the direction of  their methods.  But it clearly needed quite a bit of live testing to proof.   Due to a number of emerging problems, and losses, they have decided to make major changes, which were announced this February, below the intro to the announcement, with the rest attached.   Will follow as I can.  See also the IOTA Foundation Blog.

IOTA - A new dawn     Announcements,   Feb 05, 2021

The launch of the first IOTA mainnet in June 2016 was the start of our journey to revolutionize Blockchain. We introduced the very first distributed ledger based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) - a scalable and lightweight protocol to overcome rising costs and power consumption by removing miners and fees. We called it “the Tangle”. The Tangle was designed to be a more equitable, democratic and secure network, where every node would directly contribute towards the security of the overall system.

Our vision was that this system would go on to revolutionise industries, from Automotive to Supply Chain, Industrial IoT to Personal Identity, ushering in a wave of innovation that would coalesce in the formation of an altogether new economy - the Machine Economy - where devices would exchange information, value and digital assets autonomously.

In pursuit of this vision, we began a quest that would mean breaking down barriers by sometimes taking unconventional steps. This included a fundamental deviation from technical norms, which to onlookers made us an outsider, and to our community, an underdog. But by going against the grain to create something new, we made some missteps along the way.

Some of our early design decisions were found to be suboptimal, others reaching far beyond the foreseeable horizon. This was not only perceived by members of the IOTA Foundation, but also a range of external developers, security researchers, enterprises and organisations, who together contribute to the development of the IOTA protocol.

In our interactions outside the community, criticism has sometimes been dismissed too quickly and a number of situations have not been handled appropriately. Maturing means admitting the poor decisions from our past, and publicly showing our commitment to the principles of collaboration, transparency and openness. We can only move forward by admitting to these mistakes today, and by building and rebuilding bridges in 2021.

We have to dare to continuously reinvent ourselves and improve our technologies, in order to fulfil our vision. Being a pioneer in a nascent, fast-paced industry means that you get some things right, while others have to be discarded. “Fail fast, fail early and fail often” they say. We did, and we have learned from our failures, and have become a stronger, more mature organization and ecosystem as a result.

Acting on your feedback

With the upcoming upgrade to the Tangle we will conclude our efforts to resolve the outstanding technical issues and inefficiencies. The name “Chrysalis” represents a fundamental, natural transformation into one’s mature form. An apt name for the upgrade we are about to undertake.

In August 2020 we released the first set of changes to push IOTA towards production readiness, “Chrysalis Part 1”. The release of the second and final part of Chrysalis is now approaching, with which we will deliver major improvements in performance, stability, reliability, and security. We will replace exotic aspects of the protocol with established standards and provide a wealth of new tooling for developers, enterprises and exchanges.

Chrysalis is the most extensive upgrade in IOTA’s history, touching all aspects of the protocol, libraries, wallets and software implementations developed by the IOTA Foundation. It truly marks “a new dawn” for IOTA, becoming production ready and forming a foundation for upcoming features like smart contracts and tokenization. With these long-awaited features, our community will be able to build many of the compelling innovations we have seen in the last few months, including scalable Automated Market Makers, feeless decentralized finance platforms, powerful oracles, and smart contract based startups that can leverage the power of the IOTA Tangle.  ..... 

Examining Blockchain for Conditional Auto Access

More in my look at IOT's current activity.  A blockchain type encoding to provide access keys for conditional access.    Note the final suggestion that this could make a smartphone as a kind of universal key.

Jaguar, NTT Team Up with Tech Group on Remote Access Software

Reuters,    Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss     September 30, 2020

German technology group IOTA has announced a partnership with corporations that include automaker Jaguar Land Rover, chipmaker STMicroelectronics, and Japan's NTT Data system integration firm, to launch software that would enable consumers to remotely access and control devices like cars and appliances. The IOTA Access software also can grant and revoke conditional access for use of the remote devices by individuals other than the authorized user. IOTA’s Dominik Schiener said the software will be embedded in Jaguar vehicles. Said Schiener, “With IOTA Access, we have to focus on getting more to the consumer. You want to be able to use your phone to access anything. Our phones should be our personal keys.”

Digital Assets in a Secure and Open Infrastructure With Digital Twins

Brought to my attention, note my previous posts about IOTA and possibilities for use in IOT applications using 'smart contract'  style architectures.

Zero Defects, Digital Twins and IOTA

Pickert (https://pickert.de/)  and the IOTA Foundation jointly demonstrate the power of zero defects and digital twins for manufacturing.

Supply Chain tracking is one way to demonstrate the benefits of IOTA’s ability to store information about digital assets in a secure and open infrastructure. The IOTA Tangle guarantees not only the immutability of data, but also the sharing of information across customers and partners in the value chain. One example is the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP), which is set up to create an interconnected technology highway for Eastern African businesses and governments’ agencies systems to communicate with each other and international counterparts in a transparent and secure manner. This allows for more established trust in the tracking of provenance and authenticity.

Today, we add an important piece of information — the digital twin and IOTA’s role in smart manufacturing.  ... " 

Update on IOTA

Had taken a closer look at the IOTA system, primarily because it operated as a mining-less blockchain capability.  And had potential for smart contract style operation.  See it characterized as a ' fast probabilistic consensus mechanism'. Here now an update:

IOTA Foundation Enters Base Layer Race With ‘2.0’ Testnet

IOTA is addressing the technical feature that nuked the blockchain-like network for nearly two weeks earlier this year.

The IOTA Foundation announced Wednesday it is doing away with the “coordinator” that previously validated the blockchain’s transactions.
The new “coordinator-less” network, billed as IOTA 2.0, is meant to rival other smart-contract platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, Tron and Cardano.
IOTA’s MIOTA token currently ranks as the 24th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to CoinGecko data, besting zcash (ZEC), cosmos (ATOM) and basic attention token (BAT), among others.
IOTA’s new “Pollen” testnet will serve as a research testbed for a new “fast probabilistic consensus” mechanism.
The IOTA Foundation claims the new network will support decentralized applications (dapps) and smart contracts that can transact without incurring fees.  .... "

IOTA Smart Contracts

Brought to my attention, the use of smart contracts as is foreseen in the IOTA system we have been examining for use.  Most of the detail is at the link.

Introduction to IOTA Smart Contracts
I want to thank my colleagues in the IOTA Foundation who provided input and feedback for this article. In particular, Eric Hop, who headed the Qubic project and now joins IOTA Smart Contracts, and Jake Cahill, who is responsible for most of the wording.

IOTA Smart Contracts is an ongoing effort by the IOTA Foundation. The goal of this article is to inform the community about what we are doing and where we are heading with IOTA Smart Contracts. It also presents an opportunity for the community to begin contributing to the project with questions and feedback.

Background
Recently, Eric Hop presented the Qubic project in his article The State of Qubic, and explained our decision to focus exclusively on smart contracts for the time being. Naturally, these developments raised many questions from the community about how IOTA Smart Contracts relate to Qubic’s vision.

This article will answer those questions, providing some context and a technical introduction to IOTA Smart Contracts. Although many aspects of IOTA Smart Contracts were derived from the Qubic project, in many ways it is a standalone project in its own right. We believe the direction we are taking has lots of potential and we are now taking the steps necessary to prove this potential in practice.

What is a Contract?
Before we define a smart contract, it is important to first understand what a legal contract is.

Legal contracts are non-deterministic agreements that are subject to complex legal systems. The laws surrounding contracts vary depending on a number of factors, such as the country in which all parties entered into the contract. The most important word here is “non-deterministic”. This means that contracts are often ambiguous, and their subjective interpretation can lead to disputes. .... " 

IOTA Execs Refund Hack Losses

I have in the past talked about IOTA, a unique kind of blockchain system.  This past February it was a subject to a hack and lost some $1.4 Million in cybercurrency.   Now the losses are being refunded.  No details about the vulnerability of the system to hack has been confirmed, except that it was probably random-number seed theft or manipulation.  Still this is very worrisome,  and until this is fully explained and patched, I would recommend caution.

An IOTA executive is personally reimbursing victims of February's Trinity wallet hack in order to "preserve" the project's runway, he told CoinDesk.  

The founder of the distributed ledger network, David Sonstebo, said he would repay people affected by the $2 million hack from his own IOTA holdings. The "main motivation for the decision" had been to "safeguard the IOTA Foundation's runway" over the next 12 months, he added.

The foundation was forced to suspend the IOTA network in February after hackers stole more than $8.5 million in IOTA's native token MIOTA, worth approximately $1.4 million at the time of writing. The network only came fully back online again on Tuesday.

Sonstebo announced he would personally reimburse victims earlier this week, following weeks of internal discussion. "It's just preemptive step in the worst-case scenario of something drastic happening overnight," he said. ... "

Generalized Smart Contracts with IOTA

Have now examined the potential and depth for 'smart contracts' for several blockchain applications.   Here one example:

Smart Contracts and IOTA

Markus in Medium

The topic of smart contracts is a very important one for future business processes of IOTA. Some readers might already have heard of so called Smart Contracts, for others this term is completely new and again others are experts in this topic. This article is intended to help readers understand why smart contracts are so important to businesses and individuals, and what they have to do with IOTA ..... "

IOTA, FiWare and more

Brought to my attention regarding IOTA, also the connection to Fiware, which was new to me.  Regarding identification and secure use of knowledge/data.  Mentioning this here for later examination.

Video from the IOTA meetup in Karlsruhe gives a great overview of identities and the semantic layer of the decentralized IOTA marketplace using eClass…    https://youtu.be/nbQbLeKLUkQ

... IOTA is also collaborating with FIWARE  https://www.fiware.org/

FIWARE: THE OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM FOR OUR SMART DIGITAL FUTURE
-Driving key standards for breaking the information silos
-Making IoT simpler
-Transforming Big Data into knowledge
-Unleashing the potential of right-time Open Data
-Enabling the Data Economy
-Ensuring sovereignty on your data  .... 

https://iota-news.com/fiware-tangle-poc-what-is-fiware-friend-or-foe/

New Mobility Lab

Brought again to my attention.   Innovation about mobility decisions and technology advances.

New Mobility Lab

NEW MOBILITY LAB INNOVATION
New Mobility World® is a registered Trademark of New Mobility World Inc.

In order for companies to not only survive, but to thrive in this new world, they need to become part of the community that creates the future, rather than watch from a distance. Most traditional players struggle with new technologies that are at the core of emerging business models. They fail to make new connections to become part of the emerging mobility ecosystem.

To address the complex challenges ahead, cross-industry collaboration is required. New partnerships need to be formed to transform physical products into the digital and connected solutions of tomorrow. However, most companies are still stuck in traditional industry silos and remain predominantly inward focused.

Corporate R&D tends to work well for sustained innovation where incremental changes continue to optimize existing products. However, internal R&D tends to fail when it comes to disruptive innovation. Which Automotive R&D team would have envisioned Waze, UBER or Hyperloop? How will your organization create new, forward thinking business models? How will you master the technologies required to create the future?

Envision. Inspire. Co-Create.  .... "

An Analysis of IOTA

Mentioned I was looking at the blockchain IOTA sometime back, was just pointed to this analysis that I had missed:   Has pointers to much more:

Analysis of IOTA   By Marvin Neuefeind in Medium

 One of the most popular coins, which is also dividing the community, is IOTA. IOTA is a Tangle based cryptocurrency which main purpose is to serve the economy, namely Internet of Things. In the following article we are going to conduct a complete Fundamental Analysis, which orientates on the guideline of our book ( Amazon.com: Cryptocurrency — A Trader’s Handbook: A Complete Guide On How To Trade Bitcoin And Altcoins eBook: Marvin Neuefeind, Marcin Kacperczyk: Kindle Store).

We will start by giving you a broad idea what IOTA is all about and then conclude to the core research and the additional research.

IOTA was the first cryptocurrency which utilized the Tangle technology. The Tangle is different from the traditional blockchain in which each block follows another in a certain order. Tangle on the other hand is completely confused as you can see in the picture below.  .... " 

Clothing Brand uses IOTA Blockchain

IOTA, which does a novel kind of blockchain consensus model, using a directed acyclic graph (DAG).  Have been following it for a while for its potential in smart contract applications.

Clothing brand Alyx turns to Iota’s blockchain to track garment authenticity
  Kyt Dotson in Silicon Angle

Clothing designer Matthew William’s luxury fashion brand Alyx announced today that it will use Iota Foundation’s blockchain distributed ledger technology to track the production of clothing from raw materials to the final product.

The system, which will be used to instill consumer trust, combines the efforts of materials science company Avery Dennison and supply chain visibility firm Evrything along with Alyx and Iota.

Using a quick response or QR code printed on a tag connected to the clothing item in question, a customer can use an app to follow a shirt or dress to “track to rack” to see where the materials were sourced from, where the textiles were manufactured, what factory the garment was sewn in and finally shipped to the retail store.

This, luxury brands have begun to believe, will fill in a missing rung when it comes to brand trust. By allowing consumers to better understand the origins of their clothing, brands hope that they can instill a better sense of genuine quality in the minds of customers.

“Blockchain and distributed ledger technology is the future for effective brand protection,” said Matthew Williams, the British fashion designer behind the Alyx label. “By supplying product information, supply chain traceability and transparent dialogue with the consumer, the brand’s authenticity is globally secured.”  ... ' 

IOTA and Mobility

A further look at uses of IOTA in Automotive Industry

IOTA in the mobility sector: a complete rundown
in IOTAarchive

The days of assembling “dumb” parts into something that moves are (nearly) over. Vehicle sales for personal ownership are dwindling while new mobility concepts are on a steady rise.
In addition, a shift from combustion to electric engines and leaps in autonomous driving technology require a major overhaul of existing manufacturing processes, designs, infrastructure and business models.

The coming decade will represent the biggest disruption any industry lasting longer than a century has ever seen. The New York Times recently titled “The Car Industry is under siege”:
“It’s going to be the biggest change we’ve seen in the last 100 years, and it’s going to be really expensive even for the biggest companies” […] Major auto companies will spend well over $400 billion during the next five years […]

They must retool factories, retrain workers, reorganize their supplier networks and rethink the whole idea of car ownership. […] this upfront investment is a matter of survival. If they don’t adapt, they could become obsolete.

The electric carmaker Tesla, despite all its problems, is still worth more on the stock market than either Fiat Chrysler or Renault. Uber is worth much more than the two combined, even after reporting a $1 billion quarterly loss.

In essence, software is given a much higher priority, not only in terms of research and development for future mobility solutions, electric or autonomous vehicles but also in order to establish or streamline near-term mobility solutions.

Overall connectivity, automation, the reduction of friction between individual transportation solutions and processes, security, electric charging solutions and infrastructure, convenience features and new revenue models are only a few of the monumental challenges mobility providers face.

With the above comes an unfathomable amount of data, for which manufacturers and service providers have to decide who owns it, who to share it with and how to secure it.

Even though it is very young technology that hasn’t been declared production ready yet, IOTA, as an immutable, feeless, permissionless and open-source communication and value-transfer protocol has seen vast interest by mobility providers — in fact much more than any other existing cryptocurrency protocol. .... "   

(Intro, considerably more at the link)

Iota and Alpha

Been following the Iota Blockchain, especially as it relates to implementation of smart contracts.   Here a new post.  I note that the post below is quite technical. I mention it here for followers in this space.  For starters on this see my previous post and the Iota.org for more background.  Note also that if randomness is important, and here it is essential, the use of an excellent method of random number generation is necessary.

Alpha: playing with randomness
 By Alon Ga         IOTA    Official IOTA Foundation blog 

If you have been following the Illustrated Introduction to the Tangle series, you might remember a mysterious parameter called α, which affects the level of randomness in the random walk. In this article we will go into the specific way in which α affects tip selection, and mention some issues to consider when writing a software implementation.

Note that this article assumes a basic understanding of how the Tangle is built, and in particular what approvers and cumulative weights are. You should also be comfortable with the exponential function, and have some understanding of probability theory.  ... " 

IOTA Partners with Avery Dennison Manufacturing

Been intrigued by some of IOTa's unique method of consensus, using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).  No Mining.  Looks to be another assured tracking play in the supply chain.

IOTA Now Partners With Luxury Giant, Surges By 20%
Directed Acyclic Graph project IOTA (MIOTA) has announced a partnership with global manufacturing company Avery Dennison with the intention of creating a more sustainable and ethically-sourced industry, The Block reports.

The first trial will occur with luxury brand ALYX and lets customers track items along the supply chain. The report reads,

Everything is the Internet of Things SAAS Platform for Consumer Products.

Connecting products to the web and applying product data intelligence to drive applications through the product lifecycle.

https://evrythng.com/customers-and-partners/iota-a-new-partner-on-the-blockchain/

Monitoring and Improving Process by Trusted Measuring and Adapting

Considerable article brought to my attention my Alex Renz. Connecting Distributed Ledgers and Operations Technology,  Ultimately my closest goal.  How do we improve process  by measurement, goals and analytics?  Here a novel direction example:

“OT is hardware and software dedicated to detecting or causing changes in physical processes through direct monitoring and/or control of physical devices such as valves, pumps, etc.”
— Gartner IT Glossary, as of Jan. 2019

IILA x IOTA — Bridging the Gap between OT and IT in Production Metrology

Creating a Wireless Smart Device Gateway for Quality Applications using Mahr Measuring Instruments

By Daniel Trauth
Co-Authors: Ashri Anggia, Semjon Becker, Sascha Kamps

Quality Applications in Production Metrology

Quality applications and production measurement technology (referred to as Production Metrology) cover an important market, see Figure 1. In Germany alone, revenues from the manufacture of measuring and testing instruments rose from USD 28 billion to USD 38 billion between 2010 and 2016. According to a statistic by Statista, a further increase to USD 41 billion is expected in Germany by 2020. Although Germany is an important industrial nation, the figure below shows an incredible worldwide potential in the field of quality applications and production measurement technology.

In quality applications and production metrology, measured data — referring to the quality of a product — is exchanged between manufacturers (e.g. OEMs) and their suppliers; most probably in a different variety of formats and in a short notice. This non-standardised exchange of quality data is associated with considerable financial losses, because on one hand there is no reasonable exchange standard and on the other hand cooperation between manufacturers and suppliers without exchange standard simply does not work.

In recent years, few attempts for exchange protocols like Quality Data eXchange (QDX) or Advanced Quality Data Exchange Format (AQDEF) have become increasingly common in use. For direct integration of devices into Statistical Process Control (SPC) software, some standards such as the MUX-50 data format are available. However, this is an error-prone process with low trustworthiness.

It is imperative that the measured data should be transferred immutably conforming high data security standards and existing data exchange protocols. With advancing digitisation and globalisation, the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as a decentralised protocol can lead to a worldwide backbone for measured quality data, enabling trust, data security and widely useful exchange format. But first, one needs a concept to combine Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT). .... " 

Qubic for Process Anyone?

Am looking to do an application that will insert 'smart contract' type specifications to observed business process, focused by business process models. Anyone used IOTA's Qubic?   Qubic is still in development I know, but any early impressions or tests would be interesting.   Connect with me via my Linkedin contact.

" .... What is Qubic?
In short: Qubic began life as as an initialism-turned-acronym, QBC, which stands for quorum-based computation.

Quorum (distributed_computing) on wikipedia

Specifically, Qubic is a protocol that specifies IOTA's solution for quorum-based computations, including such constructs as oracle machines, outsourced computations, and smart contracts. Qubic provides general-purpose, cloud- or fog-based, permissionless, multiprocessing capabilities on the Tangle. In the long term, Qubic will allow people to leverage world-wide unused computing capacity for a myriad of computational needs, all while helping to secure the IOTA Tangle: an IOTA-based world supercomputer.

More generally, a qubic is what we call a packaged quorum-based computation that occurs according to the Qubic protocol. Below are some examples of different types of qubics - while they are distinguished here for clarity, they are all nevertheless variations on a single, general-purpose concept: the quorum-based computation, or qubic.  .... " 

IOTA Zeus for Retail Payment

A somewhat unexpected application for the novel IOTA 'blockchain' approach.  Following.

Zeux App Enables Use of IOTA For Cryptocurrency Payments at Retail Stores
By Gabriel M

The crypto payments startup Zeux has recently affirmed that it would team up with IOTA (MIOTA) in order to list the token for crypto payments at retail stores. According to the reports, the service will be available with stores that accept Samsung Pay and Apple Pay.

Zeux has revealed the partnership via social media, affirming that IOTA payments will be added for the new token and that people will be able to use it with several different merchants. At the moment, Zeux has a FCA regulatory license and this is probably part of the changes due to its upcoming launch in the European Union next month.

The company is also planning to launch its services in the United States soon. According to the announcements, a big number of shops from grocery stores to coffee shops will be able to receive payments using Zeux.  .... " 

IOTA Wallet Theft Solved?

Last years theft of some 11 million Euros from IOTA wallets using insecure random number choices,  has reportedly been solved.   Some of the security details have leaked, which could lead to better user choices.   The IOTA system uses a novel DAG architecture,  a Permissionless distributed ledger, different from blockchains, but with similar goals.   I continue to follow.

Europol arrests UK man for stealing €10 million worth of IOTA cryptocurrency   Suspect operated the iotaseed.io portal that generated and secretly logged passwords for IOTA wallets.  By Catalin Cimpanu in ZDNet ... "

IOTA is also now offering a considerable cash bounty for anyone who can hack their hash function.    Here are the details in Nextweb.

On IOTA in Forbes

Update on IOTA, I continue to follow, primarily different because of its innovative means of updating and validating its chain and contents.

IOTA - Fulfilling the Promise of Blockchain
By  Gerald Fenech,  in Forbes, journalist writing about crypto, blockchain and markets

In order to understand what sets a project apart from all the others in the DLT space, one must always start from what motivated the creators to come up with such a project in the first place. In the case of IOTA it was the realization that certain problems will prevent the blockchain from fulfilling many of the use-cases which existed (and to an extent still do) only in theory. IOTA is arguably one of the major pioneering projects that took the concept of a DLT and implementing it with a different underlying data structure to solve many of the problems with Blockchain: fees, scaling, and centralization brought about by the need for validators or miners.

The result is a network that can easily handle huge amounts of data, which the creators hope will act as a catalyst for a true machine-to-machine economy, something which goes hand in hand with the emerging technological advancements we’re seeing in Artificial Intelligence as well as the Internet-of-Things.

However, as with most other cryptocurrencies, IOTA has taken a considerable beating of late with its value plunging to just one-third of its value just a few months ago. The currency is currently trading at $0.32 on Binance which is down by 14% over the past 24 hours when it had settled at the $0.50 level for some time.

And as reported previously here, IOTA's valuation had soared to $12 billion at the end of 2018 at the height of the crypto boom before crashing down to $1 billion by August. It is now valued at around $866 million on coinmarketcap.

We spoke to David Sonstebo who is the Co-founder and Co-Chair of IOTA Foundation; a new type of foundation, with the focus to develop the next generation of protocols for the connected world. Here, we ask David to explain the journey so far... "

Quorum Based Computation

More approaches being developed for Smart Contracts.  Seems still under development.

What is Qubic?  (Much more here about the development)

In short: Qubic began life as as an initialism-turned-acronym, QBC, which stands for quorum-based computation.

Quorum (distributed_computing) on wikipedia

Specifically, Qubic is a protocol that specifies IOTA's solution for quorum-based computations, including such constructs as oracle machines, outsourced computations, and smart contracts. Qubic provides general-purpose, cloud- or fog-based, permissionless, multiprocessing capabilities on the Tangle. In the long term, Qubic will allow people to leverage world-wide unused computing capacity for a myriad of computational needs, all while helping to secure the IOTA Tangle: an IOTA-based world supercomputer.

More generally, a qubic is a what we call a packaged quorum-based computation that occurs according to the Qubic protocol. Below are some examples of different types of qubics - while they are distinguished here for clarity, they are all nevertheless variations on a single, general-purpose concept: the quorum-based computation, or qubic.  .... "