As more and more industry decision makers are looking forward to connect their assets, they are discovering more gaps in security and identity management. Centralized systems proved to be incredibly expensive to maintain , with multiple point of failures exposing large numbers of users and assets to unexpected service interruptions.

When I was first introduced to GE’s Predix, a heavy duty industrial applications, I was convinced that Blockchain could be the game changer for industrial IoT. Blockchain were a simple solution to these complex scenarios, but, with scalability of systems limited to roughly 7 transactions per second made the real-world deployment of Blockchain impossible.

Enters IOTA

The team behind IOTA came up with a revolutionary new architecture called Tangle, a secure, scalable and lightweight transnational settlement solution with zero transaction fees.

When you couple IOTA’s scalability with partition tolerance we can derive a plethora of use cases. IOTA is expected to play a huge role in Smart cities, infrastructure and smart grid, Supply chain, Transportation and Mobility.

Without IOTA a single transaction using Blockchain costs around $0.83 , with IOTA zero.

A nice illustration (minus the negativity) on what our world would look like with IOTA

IOTA and the machine economy for Industry 4.0

Much of the next generation connected assets would revolve around embedding trust within machine to machine communications. With secure machine identities, they can talk to each other and transact in a verifiable way.

So far, our trust generation has been focused around pre-validating and building known entities for smooth communication. With IOTA, machines that never spoke to each other previously can dynamically start exchanging financial and physical values “on the fly”.

Each machine within this future connected factory would have a “wallet” embedded within, because of which these machines will have their own greedy functions defining profit and loss statements – new machine centric business models.

Again, the zero transactions fees is worth mentioning here as automated machines may or may not rely on batch transactions. In fact, we are expecting nano-transactions to be the future of Industry 4.0. Under this vision, your predictive maintenance services would exchange small and big amounts resources, provide services or even exchange physical products along a dynamic supply chain.

A few years ago, it was quite difficult to see how connected factory floors would be managed, the picture is getting more and more clear now. While IOTA is an extremely young technology, it sure stands the opportunity to revolutionize our industries.

Shortly, I will address why IOTA works so well. Meanwhile, we ourselves are exploring IOTA and building next generation PoCs based on it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!