The Industry Marketplace will Leverage IOTA’s Distributed Ledger Technology, the Tangle, to Automate Interconnectivity Between Machines and Machine Readable Contracts, to Advance Digital Transformation.
The IOTA Foundation announced the launch of the ‘Industry Marketplace’, the world’s first decentralized marketplace which will automate the trading of physical and digital goods and services.
The next generation of industrial automation, Industry 4.0 (I4.0), is rapidly approaching. In tomorrow’s world, devices will contain not only asset information, but proactive decision and optimization algorithms to enable goal-oriented behavior among their components. Such I4.0 devices can be viewed as autonomous independent economic agents that cooperate according to market economy principles. The highly flexible value creation networks that result from I4.0 will require new forms of collaboration between companies – both at the national and global level.
The successful implementation of I4.0 will depend on the creation of a common global communication and computing infrastructure that allows economic relationships between machines. By combining the latest technology with established standards and openly-developed specifications, the Industry Marketplace will provide this platform and enable the economy of things.
“The Industry Marketplace paves the way for secure automated trade in the manufacturing sector,” said Holger Köther, Director of Partnerships of the IOTA Foundation. “The use of the IOTA Tangle, an open-source distributed ledger technology that is feeless and scalable, ensures stability and robustness for the Marketplace and its participants. We are now looking forward to expand the circle of participants, demonstrate the Marketplace under near-production conditions and continue its development with our industry partners.”
The Industry Marketplace will serve as a vendor- and industry-neutral platform, automating the trading of physical and digital goods and services. Building on specifications developed by the Plattform Industrie 4.0 (Germany’s central network for the advancement of digital transformation in manufacturing), the Industry Marketplace combines distributed ledger technology and immutable audit logs. This is through eCl@ss standardized, machine-readable contracts with an integrated decentralized identity system, to ensure the authenticity of all participants and enable secure communication and payments across the industry landscape.
The Industry Marketplace has been developed as an open-source initiative and is free to join. Open innovation with other industry partners to explore new business models and the many possibilities of industrial automation is encouraged.
Key Features include:
- Vendor- and industry-neutral platform and communication
- Standardized communication for contracts, product data, purchasing, bids, orders, services
- Implementation of the Industry Platform 4.0 principles for driving forward digitalization and manufacturing
- Semantic language, based on open standards, developed by Platform Industrie 4.0 and academic institutes, as well as industrial non-profit organizations such as eCl@ss
- Decentralized and globally accessible protocol with paramount security
- Low system requirements
- Integrated decentralized ID, to ensure the authenticity of all participants
- Integrated payment option for goods and services, without transaction fees
- Payment Queue to execute outgoing payments in high frequent environments, e.g. buying many individual data sets, like weather data
- Immutable audit log for every step (including payments) to be compliant with regulatory aspects, digital trust as design principle through the IOTA Tangle
Thorsten Kroke, Head of Digital Processes & Standards, eCl@ss, said:
“The industry marketplace is designed to solve the current issues around creating a common standard language for autonomous machine to machine communication. This is an essential aspect of Industry 4.0, where secure data exchange without the loss of key information for decision making are foundational requirements.”
“The IOTA decentralized identity system is capable of solving an industrial need right now: identifying physical devices. Identity is a prerequisite to attach an Asset Administration Shell to a physical device,” said Jörg Nagel, Managing Director, Neoception. “The DID used by the Industry Marketplace may seem futuristic to some, but it solves a real problem for the industry, by providing globally unique IDs.”
