Recent hacks have caused concern for the general Blockchain ecosystem. These breaches are nothing new, they have been happening for years. Generally it’s the Cryptocurrency exchanges that are attacked, wallets have been infiltrated and funds removed. We witnessed a more recent incident with NEM (Blockchain Protocol) in Japan and around $500 Million was stolen. It was considered one of the largest in the history of Blockchain. There was also another recent attack involving Raiblocks (aka NANO) where 17,000,000 units were stolen from BitGrail. Atonomi, which is going to be an IOT (Internet of Things) security firm, intends to be part of the many solutions in Blockchain security, but mainly focused on the IOT sector. I met the team down at the North American Bitcoin conference and was convinced they could be a potentially huge company entering the Blockchain space.
The Atonomi team is headed by Vaughn Emery, CEO of Centri Technology. Centri is a cyber security firm focused on the IOT space. They currently have some major corporate accounts and partnerships like Arm, Flex, Microsoft, and Intel which make them appealing as a long term ICO investment. Vaughn was also a managing partner for Seattle based IT Source, another cyber security firm. His co founder, David Fragale, was a Director at PWC focused on the Blockchain research division. He has an MBA from MIT in Business Administration and was also a Senior Financial Analyst at the Pentagon. The experience of these founders show the capabilities of Atonomi and potential future partnerships in the Blockchain world.
“Secure interoperability is essential for the Internet of Things to reach its full potential. The Atonomi blockchain technology vision for a global service that enables secure transactions and commerce through device identity and reputation is something Arm is excited to see realized.” – Ian Ferguson, VP Ecosystem Development, IoT Services Group at Arm
What Can Atonomi Do?
The IOT space is estimated to be worth $267 Billion by 2020. More and more, we are seeing IOT connected devices to monitor our homes, make the coffee, turn on the lights, open and close locks, heat our foods, cool our houses in the summer, and thousands of other use cases. There has been an explosion of IOT connected apps and now that the mainstream is slowly entering the Blockchain space, we will begin to see these worlds converge. Atonomi is specifically interested in Healthcare, Smart Home, Industrial IOT, and Smart Cities. Atonomi’s solution is to verify and secure the identity of the countless IOT devices that will populate our society, this can potentially all be done using Blockchain technology on the Ethereum platform. They also plan to not only secure the identity of these devices but to monitor their reputations through “security, commercial, social, service, and other quality measurements.”
Tokens distributed in the network will be used to drive ecosystem participation, by partners, and participants in this vast network. What is also interesting about Atonomi is that they intend to be a platform that can be built on top of. This will allow new partners to grow the network and add more features to this security protocol.
The Future of IoT & Blockchain
With companies like IOTA (another Blockchain platform related to IOT) aiming to dominate this niche, it only makes sense that Blockchain security would be implemented in the space, in order to verify records on the Blockchain and prevent tampering. Also the distributed nature of Blockchain allows for more data to be spread across the many networks and this again goes back to the need for the highest levels of security to protect that data. IOT, given its personable nature and being apart of our daily home life is going to be a detriment in the near future and vulnerable to attacks. Atonomi has a very strong use case and an experienced team to deliver what it says they will.
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