Blockchain Technology and Internet of Things are the two words which would catch your attention no matter which part of the web you are navigating. And truly, the ‘Hype’ is worth it. If the technology leaders would implement what they are planning successfully, then this would be the next step in the evolution of technology.

IoT Is Here!

So, let’s first talk a little about Internet of Things (IoT). As the name suggest, IoT is the internet that would connect ‘things’ such as sensors, wearable devices, etc. The concept is much more vast than machine communications (M2M) and also includes the exchange of information between machine to people, people to the machine, people to objects and objects to people. When machines can exchange information autonomously, the efficiency and effectiveness of many operational processes increase many folds. This is particularly very useful in inventory management and lean manufacturing, which are a part of many industries.

However, many technology experts have raised concerns about the security of IoT. Nearly every system connected to the internet is hackable. Then does this makes all the devices connected with IoT hackable too. If someone can hack these devices and steal data, then the damage done to the related businesses would be enormous.

Blockchain To The Rescue!

And this is where Blockchain comes to the rescue of IoT. Blockchain Technology is known for the its security features. It is based on distributed ledger technology, in which all the computer in the network has a copy of database, and information related to any transaction/change gets encrypted and recorded in the form of a data ‘block’. These blocks have references to each other and are stacked in a manner which is unalterable.

Now, this discussion lead us to a very critical question, if the Blockchains would be implemented for the devices connected via IoT, would they be able to store and handle a huge amount of data. Since the Blockchains would require these devices to download the whole database copy, then they should have enough space to store them. But unfortunately, the small devices such as wearables, don’t have that much storage space.

Modified Blockchain Solutions For IoT Devices

To answer the concern mentioned above, a new concept of Holochain has been developed. Holochain uses DHT (Distributed Hash Table) technology which contacts all the nodes in the network and asks for the data which is requested by the client node.Then, it collects a piece of data from different nodes and downloads it on the client node. Thus, each node doesn’t require to have a full copy of the database. Another variant of Blockchain application is being developed which would form ‘block’ of data more frequently, compared to the present Blockchain technology that forms data block every 10 minutes. This is a crucial requirement since thousands of transaction happens in a second on IoT.

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