For all healthcare operators and logistics companies globally, monitoring temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors is becoming increasingly important for risk management, compliance, and ensuring a high quality of goods and services. Existing condition monitoring solutions require that data stored in sensors is either collected manually or relayed to the cloud. In both cases, it is possible and often easy to manipulate the records, which raises questions about security and reliability of such data.

By leveraging mechanisms of Distributed Ledger Technology, the Kontakt.io and IOTA solution is going to ensure that device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication of telemetry streams is encrypted and the data itself is unalterable. Manufacturers, carriers, inspectors, technology providers, and consumers alike will benefit from this technology. It will increase trust and transparency, ease dispute resolution, result in better compliance breach detection, and consequently prevent faulty products from being delivered to consumers.

IoT and blockchain technologies naturally go hand in hand because they have a lot in common,” said Philipp von Gilsa, CEO at Kontakt.io. “Both are decentralized, their markets are in early stages, and a limited number of players showcased successful applications. We are starting our Distributed Ledger initiative with IOTA to speed up adaptation and innovation in both spaces. Up until now, we have not heard about successful blockchain applications in IoT because of the amount of computing needed to execute a transaction,” says Łukasz Szelejewski, CTO at Kontakt.io. “In IoT, where a transaction involves tiny bits of data transferred by small battery-powered devices, blockchain has been too expensive and energy-consuming to succeed. We have decided to work with IOTA because it removes the cost barrier, and it needs little computing power to confirm transactions. Moreover, IOTA, unlike blockchain or Ethereum, is capable of processing a lot of operations in almost real time. In fact, the more transactions it has queued, the faster it scales. For all these reasons, IOTA makes Proof of Work possible and efficient in the IoT environment and is likely to become the next security standard for IoT.

Dominik Scheiner, Co-founder and Co-Chairman of the IOTA Foundation (IOTA) believes the partnership will provide a vital regulating base from which a better supply chain can be built.