Dr. Raullen Chai on IoTeX’s protocol for IoT devices

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have dr roland chai ceo and founder of iotex roland welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today hi ashley rollin good having you here thanks for having me here you're very welcome uh let's dive into what machine phy labs is working on in

0:24iotex and um connecting dapps to you know real world solutions something i feel like is very necessary and this is very timely for this but i would love to start the interview from just a high level overview for those who aren't familiar with iotex on you know what solutions has your team been working on and then we'll dive into everything in the ecosystem

0:47sounds great all right let's kick it off just with uh within you know high level overview on you know sort of the main functionalities of the ecosystem yeah um for iotax um so we started back in 2017 with three co-founders you know me and two other co-founders and we expand the team you know through the years to like 50-ish people right now so the things we're working on is

1:12like the intersection of iot and the blockchain right so we in the past four years we have built a lot we have built this layer one blockchain from scratch which is uber compatible um like a high qps pos blockchain which has been supported by all the top exchanges in the world and on top of this chain so we're building a lot of things um for example we have our bridge connecting

1:34iotex network to other crypto networks like ethereum polygon so far so so forth and we do have our wallet explorer sdk you know so that's why people actually developers can use this chain for d5 dog game nft applications but most importantly so we have a layer too we call the web stream which is the layer actually you know connecting with the machines interacting with the

1:58machines uh so that's kind of like a sick resource of iotex and also facilitates our reflection about you know the machine factor mm-hmm great intro roland and great to hear about the evm compatibility i'm really interested in diving a little bit more into the iot aspect as well you know having started iotex in in 2017 as you mentioned um layer ones and layer twos

2:23were a lot different back then and and i feel like iot as an industry itself has also grown a lot since then um can you talk about how you've how you've grown and how you've pivoted through watching the growth of d5 and trying to keep up in the iot sector yeah i think that's a great question i think fife gave us like a very great relation about uh how to do the

2:46incentive or like a mechanism design in the web 3 space so by having a very good mechanical design you can actually coast code start your network for you know for example like a lending or yield farming or tax right i think this kind of like an idea has been been learned by not just us also by energy players by a game like a major players so far so so and so forth

3:10so machine 5 is such an interesting like the web 3 methodology we actually called the term last year we want to use the token or mechanism design to jumpstart the machine networks uh which will connect in the real world to the blockchain world right so if you look at like the uh the blockchain actually which is just drive driven is 1 trillion dollar

3:32website economy that gives like a bridge or something like a way to interact with the physical world it actually drives 100 more like 100 times bigger the real world economy so that's why we do think machine networks are the necessary bridges you know between these two worlds and machine 5 is such like a fascinating website methodology trying to you know

3:57jump start the machine networks by incentivize the deployment of machines or like a monetize or tokenize the utility actually like most likely the data coming out from the machines and also enable the self-involving governance of machines in the long run so that's kind of like the things we you know we identified in the past in the past four years um and we are fully like

4:20innovation building the machine file really cool relent and you know coining machine fi i think is i feel like a lot of people don't understand the full um you know the full scope of what machine learning is going to become you know if everyone says how machines and ai are going to take over every industry and every job and and you know people think of ai as like

4:48robots and like moving automated and ai but i feel like the where we're at with it right now in the beginning of machine phy and integrating blockchain into it it's more basic machines and like things that you wouldn't expect to take over the world um can you talk about what are the first implications of actually integrating the blockchain dapps into some of the basic

5:15machines yeah i think you mentioned a great example about ai right so ai is basically assuming you already have large-scale machines producing the necessary data so you can build some sort of intelligence on top of this one so machine fights actually addressing the uh the problem which is under the ai layer which is about how you are all like organized such a large number

5:38of machines altogether right trying to incentivize them to do the things you want so this is like the east on sub machine 5. so different like there are several verticals we are looking into uh in terms of like go to market or application machine file so uh a very big kind of category so we are working on is called like a location-based services it's lps type of thing right

5:59think about if you have like the pui data like a point of interest data for objects for people for cars for everything and you pumping those data into the web space then there will be a lot of very interesting applications can be built on top of uh for example like a pokemon go right just like everybody likes pokemon go and also some new financial products like a traffic

6:22derivative like some sort of insurance or even you can do like an extern type of apps you know having drivers to drive from a to b to earn some sort of tokens or doing like uber in a decentralized way right so those are the things that actually can't just fall into the location-based uh kind of service category so this is kind of one big category here

6:46oh yeah if you look at other categories i think another pretty big one is kind of like social or like a fitness so for example you have your uh like a rain smart ring or whatever like a tracker finish tracker it's just like a walk around running around making friends interacting with other people and trying to you know have a token design around those stuff i think this would be pretty

7:07powerful basically you can program how people actually behave in the physical world by using tokens right so you can instantly incentivize them to be more health healthy or like you can incentivize them to go to like a certain concert or like you know soccer games whatever um you know it's really a kind of way you know web3 can program the physical world which i'm very excited

7:29about that is very exciting um and especially with location based i feel like before even with pokemon go and technology people are able to spoof locations and you know with internet of things and iot devices if it's a real world device it's gonna be located somewhere in the world and they're able to track that data on the blockchain i think is important and then integrate the

7:53functionality through that so definitely looking forward to more on those location-based services rylan thank you for that and you know i'd love to follow up on that question uh with a question about you know the iotex blockchain specifically um can you talk about why iotex technology is the best for integrating with iot you know whether it's just the

8:15the speed of it or having to manage multiple devices you know how did you build it specifically to solve this solution yeah um i think we we can do this because we have layers of technology right so let me start with the layer one so layer one is a pos blockchain we built from scratch from 2017 to 2019 which has been in production for almost three years processing 45 million

8:38transactions pretty pretty stable and fast um so this chain is evm compatible that means like a web street developer token developers so this should be pretty easy to have a token actually smart contract deploy on the chain you know to have to get it off and running so this part would be like something really easy for webster developers and on top of this so

8:59we have like a web stream which is a kind of computational oracle from machines right so this is layer interact with the device so we make it very easy for iot developers you know hardware guys to use uh by having an sdk you know integrating into their machine or device and talking with true stream uh very similar to you know how substrate works right soft basically you know offers a

9:24template for people to run a power chain for pocket dots so true stream is basically you know offer such a template for those people who want to launch a machine 5 project to run option compute wow yeah yeah and this often computer will actually you know periodically um produce some sort of proof based on the machine's behavior and tailing a layer one contract oh your car has been

9:49running five miles you know today or from a to b so give this guy ten tokens right so this is on principle how everything works together incredible and you know you know you mentioned building iterations and working on this for years um and it takes a lot of capital and a lot of team as you mentioned your team's continually growing to continue to build this i saw

10:15in the recent news that iotex had just raised another 10 million in capital to help expand um so first of all congratulations on that and i'd love to know more about that and you know what are the main focuses uh with the the the latest raise in where you're focusing that capital on expanding yeah so we actually kind of uh identified this machine 5 methodology last year and we have some

10:45initial success around this machine fight methodology so this year around march we started this fundraising and we are very lucky you know so we we got like a supporter from very top players in the iot space like a um samsung as well as purple space like the jump you know draper team draper uh which has been you know very supportive for us so for this

11:10close very quickly because all the people have a very strong belief in machine fight and with this you know this part of the fund so we are going to build a team continues to build what we're building and actually launch something um like a rail you know in the remaining of this year wow incredible that's great to hear about those backers and having samsung

11:32and major players uh involved i feel like it's only a matter of time before um all of samsung's technology is sort of integrated with blockchain um are are you seeing other you know mainly just overall in the iot space um how much traction and interest have you seen from those other companies uh like obviously the ones that are invested in your company but just as the industry as a

11:55whole their interest in integrating with blockchain and using the technology to further advance iot is that a major role for iot industry um yes so we can look at this you know from both sides right for how iot can help with web3 so definitely a lot because webster we are always talking about adoption you know growing a number of non-crypto users and iot has such a

12:22great source of users so for example samsung right so they have like a hundreds of millions of cell phone users and they have the intention to you know get them involved with web3 and the machine file so definitely like iot has already have lot already have a very large kind of user base right now i think that's will help like webster a lot in terms of like how webster will

12:41help iot i think it's even more beneficial you know for iot have web 3 because iot is very fragmented right so everybody is doing their own stuff so there's no kind of unified standard or way to play i feel like this machine fight is actually the key to address this problem fragmentation problem by having like an incentive layer you know or like a machine layer built on top of

13:05everything so you know people can actually volunteer and connecting their machine to this layer to try to make money right as long as you know the finance light level so every everything is aligned up i don't i don't think like those tech issues will kind of uh remain in so that's that's how i think iot uh you know sector can be unified in such a way

13:27definitely and i'm looking forward to those sort of merging into one as it continues to grow um and now talking about connecting people's devices into the blockchain you know from those who are familiar with how defy works you know the blockchain isn't able to get real world information and real-time prices um or in the case of iot perhaps the blockchain

13:50doesn't intrinsically know about location data and other external information from iot devices do you also have to use oracle technology or some kind of input from real world information into the blockchain with iotex and is that built in or how does that work yeah yeah i think oracle is a very generic term right it's basically talking about a data ingestion machine

14:15right like a data injection system so uh the true stream of web stream i mentioned about is actually like our off offline oracle uh talking with machines but you cannot use chin link for sure right because you know so we're talking about like hundreds of millions of machines so there must be a very scalable technology you know to dealing with the data coming out from those

14:36machines and of course like a layer one block no matter how scalable it is you cannot handle those hundreds of millions of data machine like you know in a second in a few minutes you cannot so that's that's how it works like we funnel all the data from the 100 million machines to the to the web stream layer you know doing some like a streaming computation and having the proof which

14:58is a very concise maybe one byte or like a 10 bytes time kind of proof go into the layer one contract their one block chain and saying you know the machine has been done something and the layer one count con the layer one the smart contract on the layer one will actually in charge of you know how to do the token economics so which makes the system very scalable

15:21great and you know we keep talking about having iot devices or having cars being able to monetize uh at those devices so they can actually earn uh cryptocurrency uh or money and in some way um how close are we or where are you guys at right now with iotex and having people that are already involved with cryptocurrency um or just have iot devices to be able to monetize those and

15:48then how would that work um so so like i said we are working on this like a location-based services vertical right so we do have like client-side devices so one is what we call paypal tracker it's a hardware open source gps tracker plus other 16 sensors on this one and we do have a software reversion for this paypal tracker which is an application on the running on the phone

16:12for this kind of client side devices we have like a half you know um half a million users kind of signed up right now so which is still growing you know as time goes by and on the on the on the um demand side which which is something like we're building is called pop proof of presentation protocol so which is an abstraction of uh you know so where those peoples are where the cars are

16:37right then we're going to expose those things to the developer to having them to come here to build something really like amazing which they cannot build on top of you know for free apostolate enough but avalanche are you cereal definitely very exciting and on the on you know on the cryptocurrency side with the iotex currency um it are you using just uh the native token in the protocol

17:02at least at first for the for the earning and for the transactions and communication between devices um or or how does that work on the on the actual transaction side on the transaction side you know from the device to the web stream for now so there is no charge right it's kind of open and free and in the future we may have some sort of token economic design

17:25kicking here and for all the layer one transactions that's definitely like an io text token very cool and what is the best way for people to get involved um as an uh you know as a person who's interested in cryptocurrency or just interested in iot devices how can they start contributing and potentially start earning from iotex right now yeah so there are a couple ways right so

17:51you can take a look at our website iotx.io on machine5.com i think we have those info you know information almost everywhere on these two websites and they can always follow our tweet is io tags underscore io or they can join our discord channel so we do have like a developer type of channel for machine fight developers so if you you're super interested you should come

18:14here you know talk with other developers and also our people actually record you on this channel about you know having some uh if you have some great ideas about the messaging 5. great roland thank you so much i will leave the links for iotex and machine fi uh the the websites in the description as well as the discord and twitter as you mentioned um and it's great to hear

18:36about having a strong developer community because i do think developers are super important to get off the ground and get end users involved and people that don't know how to code to be able to be able to monetize so thank you for building all of this i'm really looking forward to seeing those updates that you mentioned all the best with everything in in iot

18:57and and looking forward to having web 3 and iot merged more than ever thank you to iotex so appreciate this information uh let's definitely follow up in the near future yeah thank you so much ashton