EthCC 2: Angel Versetti

yes okay hello everybody thanks very much for coming just a practical question before I start other any of you who were at the yesterday's presentation of Ambrose's please raise your hands if you were no okay so it's just for our logistical purposes so that we know we don't have we can actually go through some of the parts we presented yesterday so for those of you who don't know Ambrose's is an open source project that enables any physical objects or smart devices to interface with distributed Ledger's and today we're gonna have actually kind of a two-part presentation the first part is gonna be presented by me I was supposed to be yesterday but then the fire alarm came so we're just gonna do it like that that today I'm gonna start with a high-level overview and present you a couple of business use cases of how we bring IOT and blockchain together and I'll use one particular example which is going to be new we haven't presented that before and then dr. what if our chief product officer is gonna take over and explain you how Ambrosius works under the hood explaining you the architecture and so on so just a short overview we are I would call as a scale-up so we have around 60 team members worldwide 120,000 plus strong communities so that's token holders as well as developers and participants in the network we have more than 50 public partnerships and over 200 in the pipeline and we're spread all over Europe primarily Switzerland Switzerland Ireland Estonia and we're also based in Belize we've won a number of awards and in terms of what the three pillars in which we specialize our blockchain and IOT as well as associated solutions built on top which can be dubs so actually smart contract powered applications or they can be simply applications built on top of our architecture and in terms of the overview of the stack just at a high level so we work across different stacks beginning with the core blockchain protocol we have a layer of distributed storage around it and then we have also various api's and SDKs to permit easy of applications on top of our blockchain and on top of our infrastructure and we've created a bunch of different tools to enable entrepreneurs startups and xviii is worldwide to create new email to imagine and create new solutions at the intersection of IOT and blockchain and in terms of how the different elements are interacting with each other Vlad is going to give you a deep dive but importantly we're looking at the ways how physical objects and sensors can interact with blockchain and in particular before the data arrives to the blockchain where the data integrity is assured how do you ensure that integrity of the source so we have we're working with edge gateways which basically creates data integrity of the source they sign any readings from sensors telling you the location temperature or any other parameters and they verify they put the data of indecent assault the smees is that even if the data later on is transmitted to the blockchain through a centralized or insecure protocol you still have data integrity at the device level and now I'm going to walk you through a couple of industrial examples for how we've built solutions in the business sense so I'm hopefully going to find the full-screen mode is 5f5 normally how they make fullscreen sorry planning Koenig is right yes so in terms of practical applications so I'll show you how we did it for tobacco's so this is one of our latest use cases and for those of you who have seen our booth we have an exhibition booth near the main stages you might have seen the RFID tags that we've shown the cheapest RFID tags so that's one of the particular examples of the IOT innovations that we're doing some browsers is half of us are from microelectronics and IOT backgrounds and half of us are from the blockchain space and from software engineering so we're always trying to see how we can combine two technologies to create valuable solutions for businesses and the example for tobacco is related to the current regulatory developments in Europe in particular where for instance every single pack of cigarettes has to have a unique ID starting from next year for the purposes of traceability as well as fighting the counterfeiting and rerouting of tobacco products to different markets you also have by the way similar regulations in the pharmaceutical space and we're also working in the pharmaceutical space where every single prescription medicine are sold in Europe has to have a unique ID and the question then becomes how do you tag an object and current techniques to do that are pretty expensive I mean the cheapest ones are still around eight to ten cents which if you're talking about a pack of cigarettes or maybe cheap consumer medicine even that is a significant cost factor for companies so we've created a cheaper stock which basically contains a unique ID there are up to 18 quintillion combinations so it can create a bunch of different products and at the same time it doesn't have the chip inside of the RFID tag because the RFID tag doesn't need to store any data at the chip level instead the data is related to our blockchain and to our distributed storage immediately so we found clever ways to significantly reduce costs for the producers so this particular chip lists AG at scale it costs only one cent per unit which is significant because right now it's about ten cents so it's basically we're taking an order of magnitude now in terms of costs away from the tobacco producers and we enable them to tag the object and once the object is tagged what happens at ambrose's is that the moment you produce a new pack of cigarettes you give it a unique ID you also create an asset on our blockchain and what we'll explain exactly how assets and events work but basically an asset is a digital representation of a real-life object on the blockchain and then the moment you've targeted you have this ID and then what happens is that the pack of cigarettes or maybe the pack of medicine is traveling through the supply chain and it changes hands there are different conditions of storage temperature perhaps exposure to light humidity any parameters that can influence the quality of the product you can actually record this information linking it to a particular time blinking into a particular idea of the object and recorded saya safely on the blockchain so this is and from that you what you can do it can do traceability you can do Quality Assurance you can assure the authenticity of the product so it immediately starts solving a lot of the global problems in trade specifically and in Europe since we're now in Europe there are a number of legislations at the EU level in terms of global trade where exporters have to prove the origin of their products and prove the quality of the products so with this you actually have a solution where you take the IOT element and the unique tagging techniques and combine it with a blockchain solution the important question will be there of course while you're talking about millions or billions of units and billions of IOT devices and first question is how do you assure security of the data and again your we're welcome to welcome our booth where we can show you the devices we have which put this cryptographic signature to sensor readings but the second basic question is how do you scale and in terms of scalability we also have a solution that permits you to cover the entire supply chain and we do it by bundling transactions together so a bundle again is a concept that was created within Ambrose's whereby it's it's basically a layer to scalability through which you essentially instead of a transaction on the blockchain itself you put a bundle of 16,000 entries which can be assets or events and you store them actually in distributed storage so it's an IP FS like environment around our blockchain and it's it stores the bulk of the data or the companies can even store it themselves if they don't want to make the data public and you only put the metadata and the hashes on the public network so companies don't have to reveal their whole supply chain and how it works and what commercial relationships they have so for many companies that's a big concern but at the same time they can prove the authenticity of data and that the data the data itself hasn't been changed so if later on either the government or business partners or the end consumers for tobacco products or for medical products and so on if later on they actually want to verify the data and compare it with the original they can always do that of course one of the interesting elements in the supply chain is that well in the supply chain because it's the real world and the physical objects you always have certain kind of black spots so we've had at the booth a number of people who came and asked questions well what if somebody you know you're tracking medicine for example where temperature matters and somebody puts an ice cube on top of your sensors or any other clever workarounds well that's the interesting part that yes in the physical world you always have some workarounds however what we have to acknowledge is that the vast majority of fraud is happening not that people putting ice cubes on sensors to fake the temperature but rather at a massive but manipulation and erasure of data so basically replacing the truth and this is where of course using a blockchain solution coupled with IOT source data can help greatly and on this part I will give you a kind of an overview here and I think here maybe Vlad will take over to explain you kind of how it works under the hood in terms of different physical objects interacting either through a gateway so basically through a secure element that we have signing the date and putting it two hours to our blockchain and then later on the data itself can be used for any industrial purposes again for those of you who can visit our booth we can show you the different applications for companies that we've built on data analytics and so on or objects can interface directly threads decays and the rest of that can give you an overview exactly how it works and the technical sense and there will be more than happy to meet you at our booth which is as I said at the central room to give you more information on the business cases okay good morning say out just you know the overview a century engine gave it I think the whole point is by combining IOT and blockchain technology we can make those supply chain much more transparent collecting all the data in one single place insure it as required with the authorities so just before jumping in too much into the details let's just talk about IOT itself for a second what does that mean so I think in last few years we've seen a tsunami of connected devices appearing toothbrushes lamps a bunch of things that somehow talks to your phone talks your devices talks to the Internet for all sorts of use cases so even though for ten years this has been happening there are still a few very important problems that haven't been solved today and I think we can summarize the main challenges in the IOT as the three asses so the first s is standardization so if you look at the history of IOT for 10 years 20 years there's been like a bunch of protocols each one not compatible with each other many of them are proprietary or obscure they're owned by some consortium of companies so really really a big mess and there's no single standard to bind them all today in the energy space there are 50 of them so it doesn't really work the second issue the second s remains scalability so when you think about the scenarios that analysts tell us in five years there will be 50 billions of connecting devices where will all that data go we're talking about terabytes of data produced every minute every hour so obviously current blockchain solutions do not provide a substrate to store the entirety of all that data so how does that work how do we fit the two together the third s is essentially security if you've got a IOT solutions in the past I've been researcher in my previous life I mean in IOT the first question that comes up at talks about IU T's well what about security and the answer is yeah we'll fix that later so it's more an afterthought rather than directly building into the product into this ocean and this status quo has led to a century all the problems you see today where fridge are being used as a proxy for hackers to to do all sorts of bad things so those are the main problems that even today haven't really been solved in the IOT and the rest of my presentation is I'll try to to show how our solution how combining blockchain can help solve all those three problems so the first observation is essentially that blockchain is really interesting for IOT because IOT came from a very hardware world very very old-school industrial and during back in the days it has moved more and more towards more modern protocols and such but it's still a very very old feel in a certain way just that it was used in very close profit or environments and now when you look at everything happening around blockchain which comes which which is really about larger systems a bunch more interoperability a bunch more decentralization that's a very interesting trend that the IOT can benefit a lot so really the simple summary of what what we're doing is we try to make IOT and blockchain work together at scale so the the simplest definition of our technology is essentially a middleware to integrate applications sensor make all of that data work much more seamlessly together but also by supporting private and public data because as Indra explained some companies don't want to share some of that data others do want to be extremely transparent we also have been developing a universal data model a higher level abstraction than blockchains because in blockchain it's strongly essentially smart contract calls transactions and wallets here in the IOT space we're looking at a level above and really focus on the data how do you describe a data stream from a sensor from a smoke detector from an alarm how do you describe all of that in a very Universal standardized way if one of the key element we wanted to look as well is how can we fix the cost of using the system in u.s. dollars because if you if you depend on the volatility of token is anyone trying any company trying to use such a system if they don't have the ability to understand how much it's gonna cost them they're very unlikely to use it obviously everything we do is open-source and especially to make all that work in a decentralized way we've been spending a lot of time on crypto economics so that's the stock angela has presented before core blockchain at the centre really to coordinate everything happening on top of that we have a distributed storage layer which is where we can store a lot more data this is how we score we can scale with the quantity of data we want to store the third level is really although the API is the the gateways how do you connect more traditional devices or enterprise systems back to the blockchain what's the the proxy the interface if you want and on top of that the various apps so let's look a little bit more closely at the 3 s's so the first as is as I mentioned the standard so if you are I don't know you own a hotel and you want to connect the different things in your building air conditioning the heating lights security doors if you want to create a dashboard that integrates all that data or like a command center for your building you have to learn a bunch of very very obscure protocols that very few people actually know how many in the room know an ocean how many good nice and how many can program with an ocean no more hands well sorry the point I'm trying to make is there are hundreds of very very obscure things that are very difficult to learn and the audience for people who can use that is very very limited so the our solution we've been working for for many years on that is what we call the web of things is instead of trying to look closely at all those low-level standards and learn all of them and try to integrate many-to-many which becomes a really really hardcore mess we try to move the abstraction and the programmability layer a little bit above by using web standards web technologies such as HTTP REST API is Jason all those real things that have been used on the web and try to address and make everything your lamp your your door everything that that is electronic in a way controllable via REST API so this makes a lot of sense because first you leverage all these technologies all those technologies all those solutions we've been exploring for almost 30 years now caching web authentication which isn't necessarily always the best but you can never add all of that you can you don't have to reinvent the wheel and reinvent all those things in every new protocol and besides I mean tcp/ip Wi-Fi routers all of that you can take it for granted in most situations and that's really important to leverage that the second very important argument is that HTTP itself is a protocol it was really designed for billing large-scale decentralized ad hoc systems so you know when you go to a website you don't need to install a driver to talk to that website so in the same way when you want to talk to any sort of device it should be as easy as sending a request to that device without necessary installing a specific driver for that device simply understanding what commands it provides you and the third obvious reason is to integrate all those devices to extend the web we have today and integrate real world data directly natively so you can directly take a JavaScript you know you can just use JavaScript to turn on the lights and do all those things don't make it a lot more interesting and the reason is that web stack web technologies is a lot easier to learn for people so you have hundreds of millions of people who can write basic JavaScript obviously more advanced as well but very very few can learn and and who are interested in learning all those more obscure languages so all of that turn into what we we call the web hosting model so that was a w3c submission we did a few years back where we tried to propose a very universal model for defining in JSON obviously for defining an API a universal way to define what your device has as capabilities what is the data streams it has it supports and how to interact with the device without necessary knowing in advance what the device is really try to standardize that that's something we've used directly into Ambrose's as well in our API so this data model essentially means transforming modeling everything you want everything that's a physical object into assets and events an asset as intervention is essentially a crew to secure globally unique identifier for a product you can think of it like a folder with a very long string that is dedicated to that product or to that physical object and then all the data you want to attach to that here for example have a transportation bag that you want to carry some vaccines in it so in this case you might want to put a sensor in it it has a unique asset so it's bag number 73 and all the data you want to record about that bag will be done through events so events is simply a timestamp information that is persisted on on chain and the proof of that and all the metadata around that event is going to be persisted not necessary the data itself you can decide for an event every single event you can decide is that public data is that private data or is that data I want to share only with some trusted partners and the whole point is to standardize how do you define how do you describe the data itself in a in an almost schema less recent model to make it very very easy to integrate a good across applications so the scalability part how do we work how that can scale at large is we build what we call the Hermes the Hermes is essentially a rest proxy that you can connect via traditional REST API is very very simple that any what developer can start reading sending data to those gateways and what the gateways do is they take a bunch of sensor reading package the metadata of all those readings sensor reading or anything into what we call a bundle and the bundle gets uploaded and stored on the chain so that if someone wants to prove you the validity of one specific sensor reading whether this door was open at 4:43 yesterday or not then I can give you the data and you can always validate every single sensor entry or data entry using the blockchain so that's really the idea you can think of it like infra so what infra is done is to make the development of blockchain application a lot easier by introducing rest proxies and therefore enabling a much bigger community of people to start building apps so this is in a way you can think of it like that so when you scale that the idea is we run some of those hermes's but the sword the code the application itself is entirely open-source anyone can download and run its own harmless node and a hermits node is like a mini IOT cloud that anyone can run in their private data center on Heroku wherever they want to run it and they can scale it they can use any type of storage they want and the main functionality is getting data as it's an event scene package all of that and put that in what we call bonders and the upload fee for a bundle is always fixed in u.s.

dollars so you pay that you pay for the upload fee using the amber token so that means if the price of the token goes up then you need less and less proportionally tokens to to right and vice versa obviously so the interesting thing is you have the ii the apollo is essentially the core blockchain layer which coordinates the via smart contracts all the uploads all the proofs everything around the upload and managing of those blunders and then you have a second network of Atlas which kind of works like IP FS which is a decentralized storage for bundles so every time a hermits wants to upload a bundle it goes to the network says here is a bundle and then you have different atlases applying to get and store that bundle and get paid over time for a for storing of that bundle and the interesting aspect is that introduces first redundancy so the same is stored on several places but not on all of them and more interestingly every Atlas can watch each other and if one is trying to modify the data all the other will see em he will be punished so this creates a very very interesting system so even if all the atlases were to work together and try to compromise the data the proof of the data will remain on the blockchain nevertheless so even that will be a situation where you can realize there's been fraud the third aspect is really security so if you look at IOT today 99.9% of IOT stuff today in the world beats commercial industrial uses if they're good encryption at best and some basic forms of authentication very very few almost none to our knowledge use hardware signing on the sensor so you have a sensor here it's understand so you can come at the booth and we can show you but basically we build this small sensor you can see here very small battery powered using bluetooth and it has a crypto chip on it so it works kind of like a hardware wallet so every single sensor reading from this device is gonna be signed in hardware by the private key which only exists on the device so even if the data is captured from the device with the mobile phone you don't miss we need to trust the phone because you would still have the ability to prove end-to-end that data really came from a sensor and not something in between and when you use many other solutions not having signing of the data at the source creates a big room for tampering data somewhere along the transportation line of that data so you know just to summarize I think the the point is building blockchain building IOT apps is hard especially when you try to combine the two together you have lots of basic problems you need to fix every time you want to build an app from data storage managing identities of people of devices integrating those different systems processing all that data describing different data and integrating all of that together so really if you want to be a global this.v a global IOT system you want to solve the interoperability problem to make it much material to integrate we build really a developer first platform with a bunch of tools a bunch of SDKs to make the development of those apps a lot faster a lot easier so you don't need to reinvent the wheel we have web SDKs native SDKs and to get started you can use a hermas as a SAS because what we've seen talking with many clients and partners is that the first challenge they have is to understand what's the value of blockchain first let alone the development of the app so they are still trying to figure out why do I need blockchain how can it bring value to me so our key goal here was to make it as cheap as fast as easy as possible for someone to build to get a prototype and one way to do that is here's the SAS you only focus on the app and on the data don't worry about the blockchain and all that stuff because you can do that later so once they've built the prototype and they understand and they very quickly can iterate on that prototype then they can say ok this is really interesting now on a scale so they can download the hermit's know to run it themselves but this is usually step 2 where they introduce this much more decentralized way of of storing data so yeah so that's my last night so I think the main point is just centralized IOT clouds as you see today they just won't scale when you talk 50 billions devices and all the data they need Ian the best way to make that work is a combination of one public blockchain to be used as kind of ground truth between a bunch of private data stores or semi-private data stores so scalability is a lot easier to achieve in that space and also to get a lot more performance that you need the the integrating will be a very very key enabler the integration of data and interoperability and on blockchain security and all the private key signature in all the all the security practices they should become the new standard for IOT devices which is definitely the case yet but that would be a massive change to make that work you want to have a really good crypto economic system and finally it really comes down to having a very good set of tools there are packaged together that you can just start building so we invite you to do so to come check our stand feel free to reach out we'll be here for for the rest of the day for sure and thanks and also at 6:30 another meet up at 6:30 there is a decide events for those of you who are interested we're also gonna have a meeting in French but I guess there'll be a similar content so but in case any of your friends miss this