From its inception in late 2017 to date, IoTeX has evolved significantly. Five years ago, several scientists and a VC expert came together to create what would become one of the world’s most advanced IoT blockchains.
In a very down-to-earth interview on Spotify with Wagmi Ventures Lead Investor Tanner Gesek, Dr. Raullen Chai runs listeners through a fascinating journey from academia to the corporate world and into the crypto and blockchain space. However, not without sharing a story that will blow anybody’s mind.
“I am a cryptography researcher. When I was doing my Ph.D. in cryptography, I focused my research on how to design encryption algorithms to make it more secure and, on the other side, how to crack an encryption algorithm,” said Chai, IoTeX’s CEO and Co-Founder.
Around the end of 2008, Raullen recalls coming across Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, which he thought “was too good to be true.”
Love after attack
“The bitcoin whitepaper came to me at the end of 2008. It was attracting a lot of interest not just from me but many others around me,” Chai remembers. “I was part of a group of crypto researchers. We tried to attack bitcoin because we thought it was too good to be true, but we failed. We fell in love with bitcoin.”
At that point, Chai began his deep journey into crypto and blockchain. Although for five years following his Ph.D. graduation in 2012, he remained at Google doing cryptography, privacy Cloud and security research and development, his passion for blockchain was intense.
In 2014, after learning all about Ethereum, he felt he, too, had to do something in what today is known as Web3. One could say that is where “the goal for my life” was determined, he said.
Fundamentally changing society
Look around you. How many IoT devices do you see? There are billions of IoT devices that gather massive amounts of data on us and our surroundings. By the beginning of the next decade, there will be some 125 billion smart devices globally, “transforming the society fundamentally,” says Chai.
Experts estimate the machine economy will contribute about 30% of the Global Domestic Product by 2030, but Chai highlights, “the machine and IoT industry is pretty much stagnated for a few reasons.”
Chai said one of those reasons is the high cost of intelligent machine hardware deployment. “We are talking about hardware machine devices, the huge upfront cost of research and development, and how restricted innovation and access to existing technologies are.”
Amazon, for example, has the technology, but there is no means for third parties to use their technology and build on top of their network, so competition is practically nil.
The IoTeX philosophy and methodology
The MachineFi vision is about democratizing technology and its potential. IoTeX has focussed on open source technology from inception and has provided users, developers, businesses, and device and machine manufacturers with the tools to build Web3 dApps reducing from years to weeks the go-to-market time.
IoTeX is a Layer One plus Layer two open-source blockchain that enables anybody to easily and quickly build decentralized applications on top of them, explains Chai in the interview. Moreover, the project sits at the junction of the Internet of Things and Web3.
Chai explains that IoTeX’s “vision since 2017 is how do we use (smart) machines in the real world and connect them to Web3” to democratize an economy that McKinsey predicts at $12.6 trillion by 2030. A machine economy that IoTeX aims to disrupt democratizing so that users can benefit rather than continuing to be trapped in a corporate world monopoly as it has been for decades, he implied.
“We are working on the bridge between Web3 and the real world,” he adds. “The capability of smart contracts into the real world in terms of proof of humanity.”
At a higher level, MachineFi is a philosophy and a methodology. It is finding the answer to how to use Web3 tokenomics to incentivize the deployment of machines. Furthermore, to financialize the data generated by these machines?”
It’s only the beginning
Before wrapping up the conversation, Chai spoke of W3bstream and its release, which should happen shortly. This is the world’s most technologically advanced data protocol. Moreover, it is also the world’s first data compute infrastructure that brings real-world data from intelligent devices to blockchain dApps.
As IoTeX sets itself apart from the Web3 crowd and places itself as the project best positioned to bring in the next significant wave of people into crypto, it has also created one of the most exciting opportunities for anybody to get involved in the burgeoning machine economy.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
