You may or may not already heard of the Qubic protocol. But what exactly is it and why is it crucial for IOTA and the IoT industry?

What is Qubic?

As already mentioned, qubic is a protocol of the IOTA foundation which is currently being build on top of the tangle. With the help of qubic, IOTA is working on enabling smart contracts, oracles and outsourced computing on the tangle. Since the technical site of qubic is complex, this post should explain the key factors of qubic.

Oracles

The aim of oracles (e.g. sensors and other IoT devices), is to connect the real world with the digital world. Meaning, actual events/results of an oracle are used as a condition for executing smart contracts (these will be explained later). The main challenge is making oracles trustworthy. In other words, how can we trust information from oracles without relying on a central control authority? In order to do so, the “quorum consensus” process is being used. With the consensus process, several oracles provide their information(result). If 2/3 of the oracles share the same result, the result can be trusted, otherwise no consensus is being created.

Qubics

Qubics are computer arithmetic tasks that are sent from the customer/client to the oracle. For each solved task, the oracles which solved the task get a reward. Depending on the task and the associated reward, oracles can decide whether to accept the task. Each output of a task can also be used as an input for another task (e.g. if the average temperature of today is 10 degrees (output), calculate which day in the last week had also an average temperature of 10 degrees (input). Those with the correct result agreed according to the quorum consensus process(see paragraph above) share the client's reward. Since qubics are being solved by IoT machines(eg. microchips), they are being programmed on a machine-related programming language called 'Abra'.

Outsourced Computation

As the name already indicates, with outsourced computation, computing capacity which is not needed or cannot be processed locally with IoT devices can be outsourced with the qubic protocol. Other participants of the network then can buy the outsourced capacity if needed to for example solve qubics.

Smart Contracts

Those of you who are familiar with etherium, cardano or other DApps platforms have probably already heard of smart contracts. A smart contract is a self-executing contract which gets executed if a specific agreement between a buyer and seller is fulfilled. Example: If the buyer transfers a certain amount of coins to the seller, the seller gives ownership to the buyer of the item which is being sold. The terms and agreements are directly written into lines of code, which are distributed on a decentralized network, which makes cheating almost impossible. With the qubic protocol, IOTA is planning to implement smart contracts, meaning, IOTA transactions should be able to be linked to programmable conditions. Due to the fact that there are no transaction fees for messages at IOTA, information that smart contracts require can be aggregated from many different sources and stored in the tangle.

Conclusion

If IOTA manages to deliver qubic as promised, not only will they be able to compete with DApps platforms but they also be one step further to become the new IoT standard, since they offer features which currently no other competitor offers. What do you think of qubic? Do you think IOTA will be able to deliver qubic?