Filament uses Bitcoin blockchain as ledger to store receipts of payments for devices in decentralised manner. Filament combines IoT and blockchain (Filament) Eric Jennings, CEO of IoT company Filament points out that his company does not use blockchain in an amazing or novel way. "It’s somewhat underwhelming for those familiar with the blockchain," he says. Filament uses the Bitcoin blockchain as an immutable ledger to store receipts of payments for devices in the form of digital hashes in a decentralised manner. Jennings is modest about the blockchain-enabled parts that compose Filament’s sum capabilities. He told IBTimes UK : "We don’t do anything magical, we don’t do anything special. It’s similar to Open Assets protocol or Coloured Coin-type mentality, where you’re storing other digitised assets, you can call them tokens, but they are basically digitised immutable versions of a thing that can be trusted without having a central authority. "That’s really the need we had to solve for devices to be autonomous. Everything else we do is enforced on our device and executed on our device. So we are very edge-centered. We are kind of the opposite of Ethereum. They run smart contracts in the cloud, in the blockchain; they call it the world’s computer because there is only one huge computer which everyone runs. But we execute essentially the same type of smart contract but on your devices themselves." Jennings said the Filament system does a very small amount of micro-transactions using something very similar to the Lightening Network. Filament actually developed a protocol called Penny Bank which has some slightly different properties in line with Filament’s governing design goals, such as not requiring constant online access. "Because of the nature of our devices, and not always being online, Penny Bank can have long durations between reconciliation or clearing. […]
