Part II: The R3al World Engine
“We emphasize a billion users coming into Web3, and for me that’s gonna come from real-world applications that are a part of daily life.” –Firdosh Sheikh, founder and CEO of DRIFE
DePIN is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity addressing the base problems of society. But DePIN is hard. “[DePIN founders] have to build hardware, middleware, middleware for the hardware, software, and smart contracts,” says Raullen Chai. IoTeX has spent the last six years building the necessary infrastructure to make DePIN possible. From an L1 to decentralized identity to secure hardware, IoTeX has built the pieces and assembled them together in a single interface with the launch of W3bstream, DePIN’s r3al world engine. Thanks to the collective action enabled by IoTeX and the broader blockchain ecosystem, startups can compete against centralized corporations and remake the internet’s foundational infrastructure.
In this post we share insights from industry experts and founders to demonstrate why W3bstream and the broader IoTeX stack helps scale DePIN apps that will remake entire economies.
First of its kind
We call W3bstream the R3al World Engine because it dramatically lowers build time and augments IoTeX’s suite of financial support and existing DePIN infrastructure. Simply put, W3bstream eliminates the need for DePIN founders to build their own middleware by serving as the connective tissue between the real world and Web3.
W3bstream provides an off-chain environment for developers to crowdsource data from users' smart devices, generate proofs and use these proofs to trigger smart contracts to deliver digital assets like NFTs or tokens to users. W3bstream is the only middleware bringing device data on-chain and it’s not just chain agnostic, it’s device and application agnostic, its impact spanning verticals.
W3bstream creates unprecedented opportunities for industries like healthcare, mobility, logistics, and regenerative energy, where real-time data has traditionally been difficult to collect and use. Combined with IoTeX’s existing infrastructure, W3bstream makes DePIN accessible to a new category of founder.
Making DePIN Accessible
“W3bstream is giving us this layer of infrastructure for machines to communicate through data with other machines and human owners. It’s very important. It gives us a unified standard which is an important support for the whole [DePIN] ecosystem.” — Bianca Chen, JDI Manufacturing
DePIN upsets the web-2 paradigm of centralized dominance by elegantly wedding network utility with decentralized ownership. By crowdsourcing hardware administrators from a pool of everyday people users are rewarded in proportion to their contributions. But coordinating enormous quantities of data from disparate sources with blockchain incentives is daunting even for exceptionally talented founders. Helium took nearly a decade to scale a DePIN app without IoTeX’s infrastructure by raising an enormous $365 million and building base infrastructure from scratch. But this is not a replicable path. W3bstream is the R3al World engine that makes Helium level scale attainable for orders of magnitude more founders.
With W3bstream, developers can choose from virtually any device to collect data–from GPS to temperature sensors–and create innovative solutions that give power back to users. But W3bstream is just one pillar of IoTeX’s r3al world vision. IoTeX has developed an entire apparatus of tools and growth-drivers to supercharge DePIN and bring the r3al world to Web3.
IoTeX from inception
Over the last six years, the IoTeX Network has blossomed from a few lines of code to a thriving ecosystem of DePIN builders and enthusiasts. Our full-stack technology, tokenomics, and ecosystem are still rooted in our original vision from 2017 for a decentralized machine economy owned and controlled by everyday people.
While the early years of IoTeX focused on creating the foundational components of our platform —blockchain primitives, smart contracts, delegates, and staking — we now focus on empowering developers to build on top of our platform and for our users to access our ever-growing ecosystem of products.
DePIN is the most ambitious effort at structural decentralization yet. The enormous collective action necessary to succeed makes us obsessed with developing the tools to help founders and developers accomplish the unimaginable.
IoTeX's Landscape
“DePIN is an illustration of how much potential blockchain technology has for transformational change across all industries. And companies like IoTeX are building the necessary infrastructure to get these projects up and running.” – Catherine Hickox, SpaceandTime
IoTeX is a comprehensive partner to its ecosystem, providing the tools, connections and financial support to create and scale a hyper-successful DePIN app. Partners enjoy full-stack tools that supercharge DePIN development, the cornerstone of which is a Layer 1 blockchain tailor-made for physical devices and made it easy for DePIN builders to test and bootstrap their initial launch of DePIN networks and Dapps.
The IoTeX L1 and other L1/L2 blockchains are the foundation on which a suite of middleware (like W3bstream) and open-source developer tooling was built. These network tools are open-source and enable seamless account and asset creation, transactions, dApp interactions, cross-chain transactions, visualization, staking, node management, and more.
ioPay is a multi-chain crypto wallet that enables users to manage their wallet accounts. IoPay is also a DePIN browser–listing all projects and supporting tokens on multiple blockchains. ioTube is the cross-chain bridge between IoTeX and mainstream L1s/L2s.IoTeXScan lets users view transaction history and account holdings. Fastblocks is IoTeX’s "Infura," or blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service. It allows users to quickly start and manage a blockchain full node or delegate node.
The Developer Portal and Docs guides developers through constructing applications while simultaneously contributing to the community. Developers can access step-by-step, practical tutorials, technical blog articles, updates, and comprehensive guides to master this novel approach and create the applications that will shape the future of Web3 and the machine economy. These tools constitute the web-3 side of IoTeX, and physical devices, like Ucam, Pebble Tracker or other DePIN-ready hardwares take IoTeX into the r3al world. And W3bstream, which is underpinned by much of IoTeX’s existing infrastructure, serves as the bridge between Web3 and billions of physical device.
Wrapping it up
"We’ve seen successful use cases of web-3 in gaming and finance right? But I think the physical world, the DEPIN world, is giving us bigger use cases to really change people’s lives." – Bianca Chen, JDI Manufacturing
Our R3al World Engine brings together years of critical infrastructure development that positions IoTeX as a primary driver of DePIN growth and adoption. We're excited about the potential to create real-world impact and shape the future of blockchain and decentralized applications.
We are also thrilled to watch the revolutionary DePIN applications developers create as they pioneer the next trillion-dollar Web3 sector poised to spark the next order-of-magnitude increase in crypto adoption. We know that to achieve meaningful scale, developers will need the right tools. That’s why in our next post, we will discuss the world-changing new design space W3bstream and DePIN has created and will unlock.
If you are interested in DePIN you can learn more about the latest developments in the sector and compare projects by visiting DePINscan. DePINscan powered by W3bstream and IoTeX is designed to empower intelligent investors in the DePIN sector.