We’re thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with IoTeX, a blockchain platform for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to explore the emerging intersection of IoT, blockchain, and the global sharing economy.
The GSENetwork team has been focused on building the foundation of the ecosystem and the three different core pillars to address the challenges that plague the global sharing economy.
The sharing economy, which enables peers to share access to goods and services, has already introduced many new benefits for both providers and consumers, such as lowered costs of asset ownership, greater access to assets and services, and new opportunities in untapped markets. We’re dedicated to address the first-generation challenges like fraud, trust gaps, fragmented landscape and lack of risk mitigation, to unlock the full potential of the sharing economy.
Similarly, IoT has grown rapidly in recent years and has demonstrated massive potential for further growth. According to Statista’s report “Size of the Internet of Things market worldwide in 2014 and 2020, by industry”, the global IoT market was projected to grow to $9 trillion in 2020. Blockchain and IoT has emerged as a synergistic combination, which can enable greater data privacy and autonomy in IoT.
IoTeX has created a privacy-centric blockchain platform tailor fit for IoT applications, which provides infrastructure and tools for IoT developers and companies to build innovative applications.
We perceive this as a natural partnership between GSENetwork and IoTeX. Both GSENetwork and IoTeX share the same belief — that interactions in the real world can be connected through autonomous device coordination. Through this partnership, we can both leverage on the combined research data to better understand user behaviour which will allow us to design use case features that would actually work and address the current challenges in the real world.
We’ve previously talked about the importance of trust in the sharing economy. The first generation sharing economy is not able to interact efficiently without the prior establishment of trust. This is where IoT and blockchain technology can come in to bridge the trust gap between real and digital worlds by qualifying and quantifying each user and provider’s digital footprint and behaviour.
GSENetwork is partnering IoTeX to expand the capabilities of today’s sharing economy by incorporating smart IoT devices, blockchain technology and token economic incentives. We hope to work together with IoTeX to design and launch brand new use case features, including enhanced process automation (e.g., smart locks), asset traceability (e.g. shared bicycles, shared cars), and most importantly privacy of user data.
How will GSENetwork and IoTeX work together?
To kick off our partnership, over the next two months, we will work closely together on an initial proof-of-concept to explore the requirements and processes to implement our respective technology stacks onto IoT devices, starting with smart locks for bicycle-sharing. The “Ride & Earn” program which was launched together with our strategic partner ofo in Singapore, Japan and Korea have yielded tremendous user participation, resulting in constructive feedback and usable data from the community which we’re excited to tap on in the smart lock design.
“We are excited to partner with GSENetwork and achieve real results throughout our partnership, starting with our initial proof-of-concept, which will be an important validator for both of our projects and the overall blockchain industry.” — Raullen Chai, Co-founder of IoTeX
After the proof-of-concept, GSENetwork and IoTeX will co-design a smart lock with industry-standard hardware, blockchain-enabled firmware, and server management tools to ensure that the smart lock is able to track specific data points. The new smart lock, which will run on GSENetwork and IoTeX technology, will be installed on ofo bicycles as part of a trial run to record the usable data such as ride time, routes, user information, and more will be stored on the blockchain. We are targeting to start a more comprehensive trial phase in late October 2018.
In the future, the smart lock will be adapted for use in car-sharing, home-sharing, on-demand parcel delivery and other asset-centric businesses in and beyond the sharing economy to record customized data collection including usage time, usage frequency, delivery routes and more.
About IoTeX
IoTeX is the auto-scalable and privacy-centric blockchain infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoTeX’s global team is comprised of Ph.Ds in Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Machine Learning, top tier engineers, and experienced ecosystem builders. IoTeX is developing several in-house innovations to push the frontier of blockchain 3.0, including a blockchains-in-blockchain architecture for heterogeneous computing, lightning fast Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism, and lightweight privacy-preserving techniques. IoTeX is bringing autonomous device coordination to the masses by “connecting the physical world, block by block.”