Filament uses blockchain to upgrade the entire IoT system

Rage Review : Filament, a US blockchain startup, is committed to using blockchain technology to transform and improve the Internet of Things system, achieve control of each key link, and reduce unnecessary resource loss and costs. The company has its own development direction and achievements, and also pays close attention to the dynamics and achievements of technology giants and industry pioneers. It is always prepared for the possibility of future technical cooperation.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Eric Jennings, CEO of IoT company Filament, revealed that the company’s blockchain deployment method is not new and “may not attract the attention of people familiar with blockchain.”

Filament uses the bitcoin blockchain as an immutable ledger to record hashes of device payment receipts in a decentralized manner. Jennings has not hyped the blockchain application that constitutes the company’s main function.

“We’re not doing anything magical or super-awesome. It’s similar to Open Assets or Colored Coins; digital assets are called tokens, but they’re essentially just immutable digital versions of things that don’t require a trusted central authority.”

"This is a problem that has to be solved to achieve autonomous devices. Everything we do is for corporate devices, so we are actually very marginalized. It's a bit like the opposite of Ethereum. They run smart contracts in the cloud and blockchain. They call it the world computer because everyone runs only one large computer. But we are actually executing the same smart contracts, just running on different devices."

Eric Jennings

Jennings said the Filament system uses a system similar to the Lightning Network to conduct a small number of microtransactions. Filament has developed a "Penny Bank" protocol that has slightly different design goals from Filament, such as not requiring continuous online access.

“Due to the nature of the company’s equipment and the fact that it’s not constantly online, Penny Bank can stay up for a long time while settlements are made and the system is adjusted. But it’s the same concept, and we spoke to Lightning Network co-founder Joseph Poon who said it would be the same as Lightning Network if a few parameters were changed.”

Jennings pointed out that the currency exchange unit in the entire industry Internet of Things cannot be Bitcoin, at least not yet. "Our potential and existing customers are not paying attention to Bitcoin. They know about Bitcoin and understand blockchain, but they don't want to use Bitcoin for transactions. They also know its applicability and are paying attention to it."

“Like a lot of bottom-line companies, they just adopt what works. Now they want to be more efficient, so they’re not going to adopt cryptocurrency, they’re going to adopt something else.”

Filament found similar thinking in Blockstack, a company that provides a decentralized domain name system.

Jennings said:

“Everything can run DNS. Your phone can run it. Your Wi-Fi device can run it. It just works. It provides digital identity, it can discover and identify devices across the global network, and it only requires 98% of the DNS infrastructure and a little bit of blockchain technology.”

“It doesn’t matter who developed the feature, what matters is that we need it, and this is the way to meet that need without rebuilding from scratch.”

To enable devices to transact and exchange value autonomously, Jennings said, phones could use Bluetooth to share blockchain-verified information. “If someone adds a new contract for each device, the device can get the Merkle receiving path from the smartphone.”

“So basically someone manually adds the contract and then cryptographically confirms the legitimacy of the contract to the device, and then the device will continue to operate autonomously according to this contract.”

Filament started out by producing microcontroller control hardware, but later Ad hoc networks that did not require existing infrastructure began to dominate the industry. Filament soon began to provide equipment to Fortune 50 companies, and the nature of the company began to change. Jennings' friend Jeremie Miller, who had worked on the development of the TeleHash protocol, went from being a consultant to the company's CTO.

The Filament team has long admired IBM and Samsung’s ADEPT projects, which use TeleHash. Last June, Filament began leading the IBM ADEPT research team and Samsung’s senior research team in Seoul.

Jennings believes that it is a pity that IBM disbanded the internal ADEPT team, but IBM tends to position itself as a service-oriented company and a cloud service company. "So when the document says that we no longer need cloud services, people will certainly be frustrated. But even if they promote it positively, it is related to the deployment of the Internet of Things."

“We still have a friendly relationship with John Cohn, chief scientist for automation design at IBM, who is also a member of the ADEPT team. IBM seems to be taking the Hyperledger project more seriously this time, so perhaps we will have the opportunity to work closely together in the future.”

“Samsung Ventures participated in our last round, so we share a similar worldview to those companies.”