Network

IoT project turns smartphones into blockchain nodes to broaden connectivity

A new project aims to use the Internet of Things to let smartphone users establish nodes, providing connectivity to IoT smart devices.

Smartphones could become an integral part of blockchain networks, powering connectivity among smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) industry.

Nodle is the firm behind a connectivity platform that incentivizes users to become nodes of an IoT network. Making use of the increasing proliferation of smartphones worldwide, the network uses Bluetooth connectivity to rent computing power, storage and Bluetooth capability of devices to broaden the footprint of IoT networks.

Nodle CEO Micha Anthenor Benoliel outlined details of the project in an interview with Cointelegraph, which looks to tap into a global network of electronic devices connected through Bluetooth Low Energy communication. Leveraging the ability to communicate with smartphones through this connectivity, Nodle’s network taps into a worldwide pool of devices and computing power without deploying additional hardware.

Smartphones run Nodle software and operate a node to broaden the network and provide resources to run what the project calls smart missions. As a novel form of the action-to-earn (A2E) trend, users are rewarded for keeping their app active, which allows the node to complete these smart missions.

Nodle described smart missions as similar to smart contracts on the Ethereum network. The main difference is that these smart contracts are able to interact with the physical world and devices through the network’s smartphones.

Developers are able to create smart missions and deploy them to the network. They’re also key to the ecosystem, as deploying a smart mission is funded by developer fees. Developers also need to include incentive mechanisms to entice users to complete specific smart missions.

An example of a smart mission would see a user connect to a specific device or sensor within a certain geographic location and receive payment for successfully completing the mission. Another example could request a smartphone user to complete a specific task like taking a photo at an event.

The concept is not dissimilar to conventional GPU or ASIC mining, where a user provides computational power to a network for a share of rewards. This is typically energy intensive, which would quickly deplete devices with smaller power reserves. Nodle touts that its application consumes up to 3% of a smartphone’s daily battery from a full charge, allowing users to continue using their device without notable strain.

The network forms part of an emerging action-to-earn trend that looks to incentivize users and ecosystems to carry out specific tasks or actions. Benoliel said the mechanic serves two purposes: rewarding users while incentivizing and contributing to the growth of the network.

Nodle has previously partnered with enterprises looking to use its network to power unique use cases. The app was used to power a service that made use of Nodle-connected smartphones to identify stolen cars through Bluetooth identifiers.

The IoT sector has also been influenced by the broadening impact of blockchain technology in recent years. IoT, global engineering and technology company Bosch headlined the formation of a foundation that will invest $100 million in grants funding the development of Web3, artificial intelligence and decentralized technologies over the next three years.

Solana’s co-founder addresses the blockchain’s reliability at Breakpoint

In 2022, the blockchain suffered from ten partial or full outages along with slow block times. Solana’s co-founder said it’s “not the experience that we want to deliver.”

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the past year has been mired by the network’s reliability issues and outages, but recent updates will help the blockchain resolve its reliability issues.

During the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Nov. 5, Yakovenko discussed the past and future of the blockchain, noting the network has faced difficulties over the past year:

“We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.”

Solana has suffered ten partial or full outages, according to its own status reporting, the most notable of which occurred between Jan. 6-12, 2022, with the network plagued with issues causing partial outages and degraded performance for between 8 and 18 hours. The most recent was what it called a “major outage,” lasting nearly six and a half hours on Oct. 1.

Between late May and early June, Solana suffered from a clock drift, where the blockchain’s time was different from real-world time due to longer than average slot times (also referred to as block times), the time interval during which a validator can send a block to Solana.

Typically, Solana’s ideal slot time is 400 milliseconds, but Yakovenko said that “things got really really bad in June, block times went up to over a second, which is really slow for Solana,” adding in some cases “confirmation times so we’re taking 15 to 20 seconds:”

“That’s not the experience that we want to deliver and that’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other applications.”

Yakovenko said after a recent update and the validator count doubling in the past year puts Solana on the path to resolving the network performance issues and added:

“[We’re] in a constant fight between performance, security, throughput, and decentralization, all of these problems […] whenever you improve one you may actually hurt some of the other ones but I think we’ve done an amazing job in solving a bunch of those.”

“Obviously we still have challenges with outages and bugs,” he said, but its August partnership with Web3 development firm Jump Crypto to build Solana’s scaling solution called Firedancer — dubbed the long-term fix to the network outage problem — could hold the key.

“Having a second implementation and a second client built by a different team with a fully separate code base, the probability of the same kind of bug existing in both is virtually zero.”

Celo network back online after almost 24-hour outage

It was the first time the Celo mainnet had gone down in more than two years.

Proof-of-stake- (PoS)-based blockchain Celo has been suffering from an on-and-off network outage lasting 24 hours, though the blockchain appears to be up and running again.

Celo is an open-source blockchain that enables users with phone numbers to make payments with crypto by using their phone numbers as a proxy for public keys.

Celo updated its Twitter followers after the network came back online, noting it was the network’s first outage since the mainnet launch on April 22, 2020, and that it has begun a “thorough and expedited technical analysis” to get to the bottom of the issue.

The protocol made the initial announcement that the network had stalled on Thursday at 12:04 am UTC at block 14,035,019, assuring that “all funds are safe.”

It resumed around nine hours later for several minutes before pausing again at block 14,035,045.

At the time of writing, the network appears to be up and running again following an upgrade of its validator nodes to version 1.5.8, according to a Celo block explorer.

Update: Celo validators have resolved the network’s first outage since mainnet launch on April 22, 2020. A thorough and expedited technical analysis is ongoing and details will be readily shared with the Celo community.

— Celo (@CeloOrg) July 15, 2022

On the protocol’s Discord channel, one of the network’s validators with the username “Dee” said they saw the latest outage as “part of the growing pains” of the network but that they remained confident in the fundamentals as it was the first network halt in over two years:

“Even Visa had some network outage over the past two years despite being a market leader in payments for over 60 years.”

The Celo protocol’s white paper claims that it enables users to send payments “as easy as sending a text message.” The network touts an average block time of five seconds, is Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible and supports smart contracts and decentralized applications.

The Celo network is also the protocol behind three stablecoins — Celo Dollars (cUSD), Celo Euros (cEUR) and Celo Reals (cREAL), as well as its native token Celo (CELO).

Earlier this week, the Helium network suffered a four-hour outage due to validator outages from a software update, causing delayed transaction finality.

On June 1, the Solana network suffered yet another outage, causing block production to halt for four and a half hours. It was one of seven network outages over the last 12 months.