2020 was a year we will never forget. As the world changed before our very eyes, one thing has become absolutely clear: the institutions we trusted to protect us have instead failed us and breached our trust. From the rapid growth of corporate/government surveillance to politically-driven COVID-19 policies to rampant misinformation surrounding our elections, 2020 tested our willpower and frequently made us question “who can we actually trust?”
Amidst the turmoil, there is a silver lining: global citizens from all walks of life now recognize the importance of objective facts over subjective promises. This year, the desire for self-sovereignty and a “single version of the truth” has transcended cypherpunks to everyday people. …
Our world looks much different than it did a year ago. The shocks of 2020 are still fresh in our minds, but remembering our world as it was a decade ago in 2010 is truly night and day. Uber was still in R&D mode, DoorDash was not even a company, and voice assistants like Alexa were still a futuristic concept. Centralized corporations fueled this decade of disruption through a vicious cycle of consumer naïveté and corporate greed— but times have changed, and decentralization matters now more than ever.
A decade of disruption followed by a decade of decentralization. …
2020 was an incredible year for the blockchain industry. Core building blocks reached an inflection point in maturity and usability across DeFi (DEXs, loans, synthetic assets), social (NFTs, identity), and stablecoins. These tools have gotten us to where we are today but blockchain is still in its infancy. The billion-dollar question is: what new building blocks will propel blockchain to the next level?
IoTeX believes the answer is verifiable facts to connect what happens in the real world with blockchain applications to fuel automation, settle contracts, and much more. Just like verifiable price feeds (e.g., …
We are excited to announce a new integration with BigQuery to make data from the IoTeX blockchain available to Google Cloud users. IoTeX data will be hosted and updated in real-time by Google Cloud as a publicly available dataset, which is now listed on the GCP Marketplace.
While many projects, including IoTeX, explore how to bring data from the real world to the blockchain world, it is also important to consider: how can data from the blockchain world be used in the real world? Unlike other blockchains, IoTeX is focused on enabling verifiable data from verifiable devices for verifiable trust. In the future, one can imagine that IoTeX’s on-chain data will represent a vast number of interconnected human-machine identities that engage in a peer-to-peer fashion; a first-of-its-kind decentralized ecosystem where historical data regarding its formation and growth can be verified, trusted, and thus utilized by developers and researchers of all varieties. …
Want to build your next big idea on IoTeX? The Halo Program offers grants to developers, researchers, marketers, and designers to fuel IoTeX’s vision for the Internet of Trusted Things. Halo Grants are open to any project/individual at any stage that wishes to contribute to the growth and widespread use of IoTeX technology.
E.M. Forster’s 1909 classic “The Machine Stops,” describes a future where humanity lives underground, separated from the natural world, eliminating all impediments to the growth and final hegemony of “The Machine.” Everyone lives in private rooms, and physical interaction is made obsolete by video-calling courtesy of The Machine. All bodily needs — food, clothing, medical assistance — are taken care of by, you guessed it, The Machine.
Technology is transforming the way society operates, including the concept of “trust”. In today’s world, trust is subjective — we generally trust people/companies based on their reputation, status, ratings, media coverage, and more. While this model has worked well historically, the rapid emergence of misinformation — from deepfakes to counterfeit products to fake news — compels us to reconsider what we trust and why we trust it. In the future, trust will not be simply assumed but rather proven with verifiable, objective facts. The “don’t trust, verify” mantra will become the new global standard that underpins our decentralized future.
Trust must be objective, not subjective. …
Greetings IoTeX community! We are back with our Monthly Project Update for November 2020. Throughout the past month, we continued making enhancements to our products and the blockchain and completed the 1st phase of Burn-Drop! Let’s review the highlights of this past month and get ready for December ;)
“We have long been able to protect data at rest and in-transit with end-to-end encryption. But running code on that data required decryption — slicing open a gaping security hole that meant personal data was manipulatable by the third party that controlled the code. Confidential computing protects data in use for the first time by cordoning off a black box within the CPU that decrypts, computes on, and re-encrypts data so privately that not even the local operating system knows what’s happening. This is confidential computing.”
Every blockchain company worth its salt claims to be decentralized in one way or another. While decentralization is a protean term, there is one meaning that cuts to the bone of the concept: Decentralization means giving individuals power over the code that processes their data. …
150 million Americans made their voice heard on November 4th in a stunningly close and contentious election. But the election is only the roiling surface of the vast depths of the fight for the American Dream, that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of circumstances of birth. Any fouling of the American Dream emanates from a rotten slab at its very center — the erosion of the Fourth Amendment and all it protects: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” We’ve come a long way from the days when the fourth was directed at Red Coats beating down front doors of revolutionaries. Modern violations of the fourth amendment are not physical. Not seen. Not touched. But felt. …
