The International Trust Machines Corporation (ITM), a Taiwan-based blockchain solution provider, is set to debut its newest project, developed “together with Microsoft and Qualcomm Technologies,” at the 2020 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, later this week. The news came in an official announcement by the company.
The collaboration with Microsoft and Qualcomm has resulted in the co-development of an edge agent for chipsets that have been certified and configured for use in Microsoft’s Azure Sphere Internet of Things operating system.
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ITM, a QITC award-winning firm established just over a year ago, has worked with Microsoft and Qualcomm to oversee the creation of the blockchain technology that has been integrated into the product. Julian Chen, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement that his company “[enables] IoT innovations to be built on a solid foundation of security because we know this is the most crucial factor for companies.”
“They are looking for assurance that their product, brand and clients are safely secured within the blockchain platforms,” he said.
According to the announcement, the chipset supports “powerful edge computing, low latency connectivity, and end-to-end security,” and will allow “manufacturers to create secure solutions while keeping devices up-to-date via having OS updates securely created by Microsoft and delivered securely to each device by Microsoft.”
IoT is expected to grow to 75 billion connected devices by 2025
According to some analysts, blockchain has become an important part of the IoT conversation as the IoT sector continues to grow, and concerns regarding security continue to mount.
According to Microsoft’s latest IoT Signals report, the majority of the 3000 industry respondents surveyed believe 30% of their company’s revenue two years from now will be from IoT. Additionally, while 88% of adopters “ believe IoT is critical to business success,” 97 percent of adopters “have security concerns when implementing IoT.”
Although “this is not hindering adoption,” concerns over security could one day turn into serious threats to the security of IoT users–according to data from Statista, 31 billion IoT-connected devices are expected to be active by 2020 and 75 billion devices are expected by 2025.
Indeed, Chen said that “scalability, privacy and cost are the common issues [IoT] enterprises face.”
“Most public chains face the difficulty of processing a large amount of data generated by IoT devices and that affects the scaling up of a company,” he continued.
“Meanwhile, it costs companies an exorbitant amount of money to have miners turn raw data into useful information. Concerns about data stored on a blockchain have also been raised owing to the lack of a mechanism to erase information after it’s been input.”
To that end, the company makes bold claims regarding the technology it has built–its solution is allegedly capable of ”clearing millions of off-chain data with a single main-chain transaction,” and that its “scaling algorithm can be embedded into an MCU level controller which is ideal for IoT applications,” among other things.
The integration of blockchain and other kinds of distributed ledger technology into IoT has been an important part of the conversation in both industries over the last several years. In late December, IBM filed a patent application for a task scheduling system that uses IOTA tokens. IOTA is another DLT project and cryptocurrency network that was designed specifically for integration into IoT.
According to a report by FX Street, in 2019, “IOTA tokens were also mentioned in patents by Siemens AG, Blackberry Telecom, and Intel Corporation.”