Flowchain: Rediscovering Data with Digital Assets

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Jollen Chen, Founder & CEO

We are entering the second phase of the IT revolution—the rise of data-driven businesses— as the proliferation of IoT and web applications is making ‘data’ common place. The rising synergy between the devices and sensors, enabled via the Internet, is further adding to the massive data pool and has now brought a new set of challenges for businesses in terms of management, security, and privacy of data. While organizations have crowned blockchain as one of the most trusted technology to ensure data security, blockchain’s application in IoT is far from perfect despite a myriad of studies on the technology. This only meant designing a blockchain from scratch, which marked the rise of Jollen Chen.

Jollen, as a young entrepreneur, saw the dire need to solve this predicament of handling large datasets, and eventually set out to create a technology that could be used by businesses across the globe. Jollen built an open source platform based on hybrid blockchain technology, which ultimately laid the foundation for Flowchain. Today, Flowchain is known for delivering a unique tokenized hardware technology that ensures hardware rights, data privacy, and data security by hardware tokens. “The success of tokenized hardware depends on device interoperability and a peer-to-peer network. Thus, we have developed Flowchain— the blockchain for IoT—to practically prove the concept of this work,” begins Jollen Chen, Founder and CEO, Flowchain.

Flowchain has pioneered a new software architecture for the IoT blockchain to provide a distributed ledger programming framework for peer-to-peer IoT networks and real-time data transactions. The company employs an IoT dedicated blockchain design and implements the FlowchainCoin system to help businesses facilitate future IoT and AI DApps and ensures safe and real-time delivery of data transactions.

IoT-Focused Distributed Ledger

Prior to establishing Flowchain, Jollen knew he had to solve the underlying problems of the traditional distributed ledger technology. “Older systems never had the capabilities to ensure data security and display transaction data in real-time simultaneously,” explains Angelina Huang, PR and marketing head, Flowchain. The Flowchain technology has been built to ensure both ‘speed and safety’ and currently powers solutions that ensure data security and real-time transactions for clients across the globe. Flowchain’s secret to speed and safety of data management can be attributed to its flagship IoT blockchain solution that helps businesses develop a generic and comprehensive software framework for building the distributed ledger technology for IoT devices. The company uses ‘Virtual Blocks’ to create its IoT blockchain, which acts as the base of its new blockchain design to ensure real-time data transactions. “The Virtual Blocks technology can ensure chunked data (data streams) transactions are reaching the users in a near-instant manner,” adds Angelina.

But what truly sets Flowchain apart from its competition is its ability to maintain synergy between IoT networks comprising a variety of hardware devices, such as cloud servers, mobile devices, and resource-constrained devices (heterogeneous devices). Moreover, the Flowchain project employs a full JavaScript implementation for the software framework to support owing to its pivotal role in promoting IoT hardware devices.

Ensuring IoT-Enablement

The company also uses a combination of its two other IoT-focused solutions—IoT private cloud and IoT gateway. The Flowchain Private IoT cloud solution allows clients to customize, verify, and store assets from various IoT devices. What’s more, is that the IoT cloud solution facilitates high-level target architectures for business logic and has the ability to be customized by integrating third-party open source solutions.

Besides, “Flowchain also provides a comprehensive IoT device server software on leveraging an IoT gateway solution,” adds Angelina. The solution adopts the Web of Things (WoT) ontology to provide the broker service layer for IoT gateway solution. The IoT gateway is not only capable of gathering information and communicating with the wireless sensor network but also has the ability to reuse existing web technologies, such as REST, HTTP, WebSockets, and CoAP. In conjunction, the Flowchain programming framework provides a dedicated blockchain system for IoT that can process and record transactions in real time. This also ensures Flowchain’s interoperability between different ledgers within the same IoT peer-to-peer network by using Node.js to start a Flowchain node and join a peer.

“Flowchain provides a comprehensive iot device server software on leveraging a iot gateway solution”

The company also offers a digital asset called FlowchainCoin (FLC), a utility token that can be used in tokenized hardware and AI DApps platforms. FLC allows users to access Flowchain’s AI mining pool while executing their AI DApps. In addition, FLC can be utilized not only in tokenized hardware to enable digital assets exchange without any central party but also as hardware crypto tokens to protect data and ensure data privacy. Primarily, the FlowchainCoin technology helps consumers in verifying the source of data by pinpointing the exact sensor and also warrant data being accessed by authorized users at all times.

As Flowchain’s digital asset, FLC ensures the security and validity of data through tokenized IoT hardware. Flowchain’s tokenized IoT hardware technology permits the fast and safe transfer of transacted digital assets without any third party. Flowchain Testnet—their developer community—has already been hosted online and integrates IPFS nodes through a Flowchain network to process the data storage of live video streaming, allowing FLC to become the exclusive digital asset of enterprises. As a matter of fact, FLC has not only been listed exclusively on the IDAX Stock Exchange—a global digital financial extension service platform focusing on digital asset trading—but also on DigiFinex on January 2019.

Reinforcing Business Success

In recent years, cryptography has become an emerging technology for creating more secure and decentralized systems, and Flowchain has been a leader in doing exactly that. During its almost two-year-long journey, Flowchain has scaled to new heights, which can be attributed to Jollen’s expertise in mobile applications, software design, IoT, and blockchain. The company is currently solving the most pressing problem in the IoT ecosystem—reducing the risk of exposure and leaks.

Older systems never had the capabilities to ensure data security and display transaction data in real-time simultaneously

Angelina explains how Flowchain’s technology will also be used in the medical sector and currently has working prototypes for its various applications. Flowchain helps medical professionals ensure the credibility of the data harnessed from medical smart watches. The FLC is primarily responsible for verifying the ID of each device. The solution makes use of blockchain technology to relate the data related to the particular device, and also ensures that no data is altered. Furthermore, the medical institutions can further utilize the data to uncover high-quality insights through artificial intelligence and data mining.

Setting a Trajectory for the Future

Although Flowchain is one of the newer players in the blockchain market, it has placed itself as a key ingredient for success in the IoT ecosystem. The company is already prepared for the Data Age 2025—an era which is more focused on the value of data—to its advantage, thanks to the expected influx of more than 175ZB of data. Along these lines, Flowchain will continue to push its hybrid blockchain architecture and leverage it further for the smart city projects. The company has also published several academic papers on its hybrid blockchain technology, the Flowchain OS, unique framework, decentralized Internet, as well as on tokenized hardware to educate peers on developing future blockchain-enabled IoT solutions. The hybrid Flowchain comprises private permissioned and public permissionless blockchains that can enable machine learning on IoT blockchain with the option of multiple organizations to perform collaborative data analytics and machine learning while guaranteeing data privacy. Flowchain-powered blockchain devices are expected to be installed on Raspberry Pi and ESP8266 hardware, which will be infused with emerging technologies including Flowchain Ledger, Virtual Blocks, Devify, Mining-based PoS, Hybrid Blockchain, Hybrid Consensus, and Pseudonymous Authentication to name a few.

In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of Flowchain, the company has recently launched a chartered miner award scheme that allows licensed miners to achieve true FLC incentives while participating in the Block Producer activity (mining). Following the launch of the company’s main chain (Flowchain Mainnet), the licensed miners will also receive more equity distribution and get more FLC incentives.

As an IoT blockchain project that originated from Taiwan with its core team also from Taiwan, Flowchain has already marked its presence across the global blockchain ecosystem and enjoys support from open source contributors from Singapore, Europe, China, and other countries. The company plans to expand its customer base across Thailand and Japan, given their greater acceptance to blockchain technology and IoT-enabled lifestyle.

“The main reason why Jollen chose to use open source for developing Flowchain was not just to prevent frauds but also create a developer community to fight against fraud collectively,” explains Angelina. With continuous system improvements, Flowchain plans to continually add to their suite of services.

- Arijit Sarkar
March 12, 2019