Whitepaper

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Internet of Things

• Scalability Problem

  • High operating cost of running the scale of IoT is unlikely to be covered by the profit from selling devices

  • IoT vendors cannot provide cost-effective devices and applications that are scalable and reliable

• Lack of Privacy

  • Identification: Name and address or a pseudonym of any kind

  • Localization and tracking

  • Profiling: Compile information dossiers about individuals

  • Privacy-violating interaction and presentation: Conveying private information through a public medium

  • Life cycle transitions: Leaked during changes of control spheres in a device’s life cycle

  • Inventory attack: unauthorized collection of information about the existence and characteristics of personal things

  • Linkage: Linking different previously separated systems

• Lack of Functional Values

  • 85% of legacy devices lack ability to interact or cooperate with each other due to compatibility issues

 

Blockchain

• Ingredients

  • Transaction and Blocks

    • This is the foundation of blockchain where transferring of digital assets and account security are achieved via crypto primitives like elliptic curve signature, hash function and Merkle tree

  • Consensus

    • The consensus layer affects scalability the most

    • Heavily impacts security in terms of double spending and other attacks focused on mutating the blockchain states in an unanticipated way

  • Compute Interface

    • Smart contracts, sidechains, Raiden network, tools, SDKs, frameworks, and GUIs

    • Gives developers the capability to develop decentralized apps

  • Governance

    • Incentive: Groups will propose changes over time which are advantageous for them

    • Coordination: A deciding factor is how much coordination can be done on-chain vs. off-chain

• Operational Models 

  • Permission less meaning that anybody can create an address and begin interacting with the network

  • Permissioned blockchain is a closed and monitored ecosystem where the access of each participant is defined and differentiated based on role

 

Benefits and Challenges of Blockchain and IoT

• Benefits

  • Decentralization

    • Under the context of cryptoeconomy, indicates elasticity that is often defined as the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner

  • Byzantine Fault Tolerance

    • Can be leveraged to achieve many desired security properties in the context of IoT such as eliminate man-in-the-middle attacks, and Denial of Service attacks

  • Transparency and Immutability

    • Purpose of auditing, notarization and forensic analysis, identity management, authentication and authorization

  • Programmability

    • Currently only have simple and hard-coded logic that can’t be further programmed once shipped

• Challenges

  • Native Privacy Guarantee is not enough

    • If a device’s pseudonym is ever linked to its identity, everything it ever did under that pseudonym will now be linked to it

  • No silver bullet blockchain exists

    • At a macro level the IoT devices as one specie is definitely evolving at a fast pace new technologies are integrated, new standards, and new devices

    • At a micro level IoT devices capability, purpose, and operational environment also keeps changing over time

  • Chain operations are heavyweight

    • Incapable of performing PoW-based mining

    • Not able to store large amount of data

    • Not able to verify all transactions

    • Not able to connect to peers all the time

• Related Work

  • IOTA

  • IoT Chain

  • HDAC

 

IoTeX: Design and Architecture Overview

• Design Principle

  • Separation of Duties

    • Each blockchain interacts with a specific group of IoT nodes and interacts with other blockchains when needed

    • Creates a well-balanced system to maximize both efficiency and privacy

  • Occam’s Razor

    • Each blockchain has different usages and applications, and should be designed and optimized toward different directions

  • IoT Friendly

    • Operations on the chain should be designed and optimized for weak nodes

• Architecture: Blockchain in Blockchain

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• Root Blockchain

  • Transaction ordering becomes trivial without the need for nonce or sequence numbers

  • Applying existent privacy-preserving techniques such as ring signature, receiver and transaction amount becomes possible

• Subchains

  • The permission model, specification, parameters, and transaction types of the subchain can be customized to fit into its application

  • Subchains either use the root chain’s token, IoTeXtoken, or define their own token

  • Currently evaluating Web Assembly for smart contracts

  • Devices can interact with the physical environment based on their subchains states

  • Devices can mutate the state on subchains when the physical environment changes

• Cross-Blockchain Communication

  • Pegging and Block Finality

    • Pegging is a mechanism for scaling the Bitcoin network via sidechains, and is used by Cosmos, Lisk, and Rootstock

    • Block finality is the guarantee that the new block generated is final and cannot be changed

 

Built-in Privacy-Preserving Transaction

• Three aspects of privacy, sender privacy, receiver privacy, and privacy of transaction details

  • A lightweight stealth address scheme is designed to exempt receivers from scanning the entire blockchain to be aware of incoming transactions

  • Ring signature is optimized to make it compact in size with a distributed trusted setup

 

Randomized Delegated Proof of Stake

• Elect Cnadidates

  • 97 delegates

  • 47 iterations

• Form Committee

  • Committee of 11

  • 11 rounds

• Propose Block

  • Each round is 3 seconds

• Finalize Block

  • All other nodes use PBFT to vote

  • More then 2/3 committee nodes need to agree

 

Token on IoTeX Network

• Start ERC20 and then swap at mainnet launch

• IOTX is required as virtual crypto “fuel” for using certain designed functions and providing the economic incentives

• Used as the unit of exchange to quantify and pay the costs of the consumed computational resources

• Mineable for 50 years

• Used as unit of exchange between participants on the IoTeX Network

 

IoTeX Powered Ecosystems

• Shared Economies

  • Uber, Lyft, Didi, Airbnb and others

  • Large deposit is held by a company that may not be trustworthy

  • Shared economics are not completely driven by community

  • Due to centralized nature, the user data will be stored and controlled by one company

  • With IOTX deposit is completely settled by smart contract

  • With IOTX each shared thing realizes its value and mission in an autonomous way

  • With IOTX users don’t have to trust the company to maintain their data

• Smart Home

  • Manufacturer’s cant fully control the availability of cloud services

  • Need to continuously pay for the cloud service despite their one-time charge on selling their IoT devices

  • Risk of being hacked

  • IOTX solves all of these

 

Roadmap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Team

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Qi Chai – Founding Member

• Lead of Crypto R & D and Engineering Security for Uber – 1 year

• Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead for Google – 3 years 1 month

• Member of Technical Staff for Oracle – 10 months

• Ph.d. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo

  • 230thbest school in the world

Qevan Guo – Founding Member

• Research Scientist, engineering manager for Facebook – 7yrs

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from National University of Singapore

  • 43rdbest school in the world

Jing Sun – Co-founder, head of investments and ecosystem

• Investor in Theta Labs, Inc. 

• Invester in SLIVER.tv

• Master’s in New Media from Nanyang Technological University

  • 55thbest school in the world

Xinxin Fan – Founding member and head of cryptography

• Senior research engineer at Bosch research – 3 years 4 months

• Ph.D. from University of Waterloo

Dustin Xie – Engineering Lead

• Staff Software Engineer from Intel – 5 years 6 months

• PH.D. from University of Southern California

  • 62ndbest school in the world

16 TOTAL TEAM MEMBERS

 

3 TOTAL ADVISORS

 

Partners & Backers

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LKK

• No clue

Coefficient Ventures

• http://www.coefficientventures.com/

Hofan

• The only thing that came up were noodles

Jinse

• https://www.jinse.com/

Mosaic

• No idea

Blockchain foundation

• No idea

 

Articles

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https://medium.com/iotex

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8nph0b/iotex_get_listed_on_binance_and_its_only_been/

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8pu7c5/does_iot_chain_have_the_potential_to_deliver/

 

Videos

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drTqE1rsopk

Interview with BlockchainBrad

 

https://youtu.be/wysr2VU71kI

 

CoinCheckUp   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Conclusion

I would give IoTeX an B rating. IoTeX is the auto-scalable and privacy-centric blockchain infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoTeX’s global team is comprised of Ph.Ds in Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Machine Learning, top-tier engineers, and experienced ecosystem builders. IoTeX is developing several in-house innovations to push the frontier of blockchain 3.0, including a blockchain-in-blockchain architecture for heterogeneous computing, fast and robust Roll-DPoS consensus scheme, and lightweight privacy-preserving techniques. IoTeX is bringing autonomous device coordination to the masses by “connecting the physical world, block by block.” This conclusion comes from CoinCheckUp. I personally think there is enough here to add a little bit to my pile, but I would like to see a larger partner before going all in.