As mentioned on our blockchain for businesses page, there are several blockchain use cases, as among others found in blockchain research and forecasts on blockchain spending, that are moving faster than others as industry initiatives further prove.
These use cases have been tied to specific industries (and benefits within these industries that rapidly and clearly can respond to challenges and opportunities)and to specific circumstances in companies (and industries) such as a need for fast, clear and transparent (trans)actions.
Secondly, there is a high focus on the intersections between blockchain and several technologies with several IoT (the Internet of Things) and especially Industrial IoT use cases frequently cited as being a potential good fit in various areas where blockchain and IoT meet. The latter is, among others the case in IoT and security (e.g user authentication) where companies such as IBM see an important role for blockchain or, in general, distributed ledger technology (DLT).
However, those aren’t certainly the only ones. In the combination of IoT and distributed ledger technology also faster transactions, data transactions in the scope of, for instance, data exchanges requiring contractual agreements (smart contracts), the settling of autonomous decisions by autonomous devices and the many areas where the latter is increasingly envisioned and realized, ranging from building management, supply chain management and Logistics 4.0 and the scope of Industry 4.0 overall, are important.
Given these evolutions it’s obvious that various solutions on the level of applications across all levels of the IoT stack are changing too. This is among others the case in IoT platforms where in the vertical of smart cities for instance, smart city IoT platforms which add blockchain and AI to IoT are on the rise.
Moreover, it is not just about the integration of blockchain and IoT nor about the combined usage of IoT and AI (artificial intelligence) for that matter. Multiple technologies are de facto being increasingly combined such as AI, IoT and blockchain or AI, IoT and robotics, hybrid cloud, fog computing and edge computing, next-generation security, you name it.
Early 2018, research firm Kaleido Insights took a deeper dive into the various use cases where IoT and distributed ledger technology meet each other.
In a report, “The Internet of Trusted Things, Blockchain as the Foundation for Autonomous Products & Ecosystem Service”, Jessica Groopman and Jeremiah Owyang offer an overview of the common challenges faced by IoT and blockchain, beyond those we tackled previously, present three main IoT and DLT use case categories in which blockchain supports IoT products and list and detail use cases for blockchain in convergence with IoT whereby they emphasize the importance of both product and ecosystems. The report also lists several examples and provides advice for the enablement of ecosystems in these early days of blockchain.
Before looking a bit more into some general takeaways, a quick note regarding the term Internet of Trusted Things. Trust is perhaps not what comes to mind in the broader scope of two sets of technologies, IoT and DLT, who are, in the end, still in their early days.
However, the research of course focuses on trust in the scope of the various use cases of blockchain and IoT (e.g. smart contracts)whereby we need to remind that blockchain has been dubbed ‘the new technology of trust’. Of course it’s not a technology of trust but it enables trust in a digital context of interactions and transactions. Trust and terms such as Internet of Trusted Things or a Trusted Internet of Things have also been used by security vendors or solution providers. And then there is the Trusted IoT Alliance (more below).
