Telecoms industry association TM Forum has announced it’s exploring the use of IOTA for trusted next-generation IIoT solutions.
IOTA is often mistakenly called a blockchain. The core purpose is similar, it’s essentially a trusted ledger, but one which uses a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure called the Tangle in a bid to offer the scalability required for large IoT deployments.
TM Forum has launched Mega Catalyst, a project which aims to build a “completely trusted business ecosystem where telcos, together with supply chain and channel partners, can interact together to deliver trusted Industry 4.0 solutions.”
“Until now, Industry 4.0 smart solutions have been bespoke, expensive, brittle and susceptible to cyber-crime,” TM Forum wrote in a blog post.
“Business expectation (as per digital consumers) is to be able to buy, use and manage ‘anything-as-a-service’ on smartphones, safely and securely. Therefore, a highly automated and repeatable approach is required.”
IOTA was criticised for a long time as being centralised, which defeats its very purpose. Decentralised ledgers help to ensure there’s no central point of failure while boosting the overall security and robustness of the system.
The centralisation problem of IOTA was acknowledged by its team and was due to its Coordinator mechanism of validating transactions. However, the Coordinator was only designed to be a temporary solution and was recently replaced in a protocol upgrade known as Coordicide.
“We have been working towards the removal of the Coordinator since IOTA’s inception. Now with the maturity and growth of the protocol, and the quality of our research team, we are bringing that promise to fruition,” said David Sønstebø, Co-founder of IOTA Foundation.
“IOTA was designed to address the limitations of blockchain with a feeless and scalable solution. That is now becoming a reality. With this major milestone, we are poised to accelerate into our next phase of growth and enterprise adoption in the real world.”
Following its Coordicide upgrade, IOTA’s team claim they’re a step closer to becoming the world’s first scalable and fully-decentralised distributed ledger technology. It’s clearly got the attention of the folks at TM Forum.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.
