Blockchain Engineering Group (BEG)
A blockchain is a ledger of digital transactions, but instead of being centrally located and controlled, as most databases are today, it is decentralised and not under the control of any single individual, group or company. The technology is structured in this way to make it extremely difficult to change the rules that define the structure of a database or its content without consensus amongst the people who use it.
To implement blockchain technology, one requires an indepth understanding of various topics within the fields of mathematics and computer science such as decentralisation, consensus mechanisms, incentives, encryption, peer-to-peer systems, network effects and economics - topics which are home to us.
Blockchain Applications (Smart Contracts)
At Calculus Energy, our focal theme within the BEG is the application of blockchain for the IoT industry. Blockchains give us resilient, truly distributed peer-to-peer systems and the ability to interact with peers in a trustless, auditable manner. Smart contracts allow us to automate complex multi-step processes. When devices in the IoT ecosystem are combined, we get to automate time-consuming workflows in new and unique ways, achieving cryptographic verifiability, as well as significant cost and time savings in the process. Blockchain is a particularly attractive technology for addressing the security and privacy challenges within IoT. The following features makes it quite appealing:
- Decentralization: The lack of central control ensures scalability and robustness by using resources of all participating nodes and eliminating many-to-one traffic flows, which in turn decreases delay and overcomes the problem of a single point of failure.
- Anonymity: The inherent anonymity afforded is well-suited for most IoT use cases where the identity of the users must be kept private.
- Security: Blockchain realizes a secure network over untrusted parties which is desirable in IoT with numerous and heterogeneous devices.
However, adopting Blockchain in IoT is not straightforward and often equires addressing the following critical challenges:
- Mining is particularly computationally intensive, while the majority of IoT devices are resource restricted (we attempt to use the blockchain technology/framework).
- Mining of blocks is time consuming while in most IoT applications low latency is desirable.
- Blockchain scales poorly as the number of nodes in the network increases. IoT networks are expected to contain a large number of nodes.
- The underlying Blockchain protocols create significant overhead traffic, which may be undesirable for certain bandwidth-limited IoT devices.
Over the past few years, we have worked around some of these problems and have developed novel IoT/blockchain solutions and architectures, applicable to a wide range of network topologies. In particular, we are interested in the application of Hyperledger to data decentralization projects.
Get in touch to find out out how we can help you develop a blockchain solution for your industry.