European Union’s Blockchain Observatory Officially Publishes its AI, IoT and Tokenization Report

Titled the “Tokenization of Physical Assets and the Impact of IoT and AI,” the report was written and published on April 10th by the researchers situated at the European Union Blockchain Observatory and Forum, providing the latest insight into these most disruptive innovations.

Our latest academic paper is now publicly available! Prepared by Dr. @WeingaertnerTim from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences & Artshttps://t.co/L2UY9uprBf pic.twitter.com/RP2AhnCv1K

— EU Blockchain (@EUBlockchain) April 10, 2019

The report itself was authored by the professor of Applied Arts and Sciences within the School of Information Technology at the University of Lucerne. Dr. Tim Weingärtner went on to discuss the concept of the ‘digital twin' in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). This digital twin refers to the digital replica fashioned by developers that mirrors a similar asset found in the physical world.

In total, these digital twins would exist within a mirror world, which would consist of devices within the Internet of Things, big data, virtual tokens which represent physical items, as well as Artificial Intelligence and blockchain technology through a trusted digital ledger.

This report goes on to note that blockchain would be one of the crucial innovations in the process of digital transformation, allowing for the provision of trust to peers and nodes, allowing for the seamless and safe identification of physical items as well as their eventual tokenization for use in this digital world.

This crucial importance of blockchain technology is also found through blockchain-based smart contract systems, which will play a major part in digitalization, the report concedes. Through the provision of a computational environment, one that is immutable, immune to tampering by undesirable third parties.

While also providing a means with which to automatically execute financial actions such as peer to peer remittances and transactions through the use of cryptocurrencies, we would see a virtual world that would provide a truly internationalized means of commerce and communication.

While this research takes into great consideration the associated importance of digital tokens and blockchain technology, the professor highlights the Ethereum blockchain, and its applications in the realm of smart contracts and tokenization as of greater importance. The author argues that the platform is the more ideal of blockchain solutions for this task due to the kind of potential that its programming language has for projects. It's an underlying potential that is supported and added to thanks to its large and continually growing community, as well as already existing and working implementations of its code in projects.

The author and report conclude that this amalgamation of the Internet of Things, along with blockchain would allow for far more seamless, cost-effective and highly efficient management for logistics-heavy industries such as supply chain management. The increased reliability that these technologies provide would also allow this blossoming sharing economy to grow, alongside a flourishing of data trading and accompanying monetization. These innovations would also usher in the growth of far safer means of identity management and automation.

Bringing together Artificial Intelligence with decentralized systems could also serve to safeguard and even democratize data, ensuring that it remains secure and is accredited effectively as authentic, while also allowing for the quick and effective auditing of new and existing smart contracts.

While this report goes on to paint the kind of envisioned applications of these forms of technology, it also claims that automated technology will play an increasingly important role. The report alleges that drones and robots will become the ‘actuators of the digital world,' this is due to the fact that they would allow for the direct intervention of the digital world into the physical. AKA – orders or smart contracts managed in the digital world can be translated into direct. action through the use of drones (particular tasks), or mapping and changing course trajectory in mapping and logistics for supply.

The report believes that this digital twin concept will grow to become a highly critical factor in our daily lives.

“Due to the exponential growth, which is described by Moore’s Law and many studies, the physical world will be exceeded by the digital world in the coming years. This means that speed, growth and complexity will increase by a multiple.”

Delving into the concept of Moore's Law in more depth – it refers to an observation which was made by the Intel CEO, Gordon Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors being leveraged in the integrated circuits of the time doubled at a rate of every two years. For a time, this proved to be correct, but subsequent studies have demonstrated that the rate of progress in fitting more transistors into a reduced space is slowing, something that the EU study fails to mention.

One of the elements that may be contributing to this slowdown is the fact that the scale of transistors are approaching what we know as an ultimate limit due to a quantum property known more colloquially as Quantum Tunneling.

While Moore's law was steadily being disproven in this regard, progress is being made in order to push onwards in the development of alternative means of creating processing technology. These include technologies like Quantum Computing, Optical Computing, as well as Neuromorphic Computing.

These kinds of technology would allow for the continuation of Moore's law, as well as the continuation of this trend of scaling up the computing power.

Over March, there was an alternative report that was also published by the European Union's Blockchain Observatory. In this report, the organization had made suggestions on how developers could create more sophisticated blockchain technology, these include the introduction of far greater levels of interoperability as well as firmer standards on scalability.

It was in early December of 2018 that the Blockchain Observatory also made a firm case for a digital identity system which leverages blockchain technology, including suggesting the creation of digital iteration of nationally sovereign currencies.