Iota and internet of things (IoT) firm Evrythng announced a partnership to combine and apply their distributed ledger and IoT technologies to provide greater transparency for consumer goods supply chains. The news was revealed in a press release on April 17.
According to the press release, Evrythng’s focus is to implement IoT and DLT technology to create unique, interactive and trackable identities for consumer products, with the aim of fostering greater transparency for both supply chain stakeholders and consumers.
The partnership will reportedly see Evrythng’s Blockchain Integration Hub expand to include integrations with Iota’s distributed ledger protocol, known as Tangle.
Tangle is different from blockchain in that it does not use “blocks” or mining, but rather is built upon a directed acyclic graph (DAG), a topologically ordered system in which different types of transactions run on different chains in the network simultaneously.
Both partners highlight the lack of transparency and trust that besets the current supply chain system for consumer goods, given the reliance on centralized intermediaries that can potentially omit or tamper with data on products’ sourcing and provenance.
By including Iota integrations within the Evrythng Blockchain Integration Hub, the collaboration will aim to leverage Iota’s trusted, permissionless and decentralized environment and feeless micro-transactions structure to address these challenges.
Dominique Guinard, co-founder and CTO of Evrythng, has said that Iota’s public and permissionless IoT-focused protocol will facilitate interoperability between products and devices at scale.
An accompanying blog post published by Iota on April 17 outlined the approaches the two partners have been pursuing, whereby data is collected and attached to a products’ digital identity, and simultaneously hashed and stored on the Iota Tangle. The post notes that consumers will be able to scan the digitized products with a smartphone to show the relevant data.
As Cointelegraph has previously reported, Iota has sought a range of partnerships to implement its Tangle protocol across different IoT applications — including smart cities, smart power grids for electric cars and national energy sector offerings.