A Deep Dive Into The W3bstream Roadmap

IoTeX is in its sixth year since inception. In that time, IoTeX built and kept building, and its team grew, and it also reached its most significant milestone: the release of W3bstream, the world's first decentralized infrastructure for real-world devices and data. And this is only the beginning.

As you already know, W3bstream is a unique and groundbreaking blockchain-agnostic infra that will disrupt the machine economy. It will disrupt the entire smart device connectivity industry or, if you will, the Internet of Things (IoT). It provides developers, builders, businesses, and device makers with cutting-edge tools and middleware that speed up development timelines from years to weeks.

Read more about the W3bstream launch here.

W3bstream will also revolutionize the reward economy and make our lives better by allowing us to generate additional income from our data. So, instead of the big corporations continuing to profit from user data, we, the users, finally get that power back.

Is that exciting or what? Yes, it is, so let's dive into the roadmap because tremendously fascinating times lie ahead for MachineFi Lab, IoTeX, the machine economy space, and the entire Web3 community.

A Roadmap for the MachineFi future

The first phase of this exciting launch is Devnet Seed. Our core developer, MachineFi Lab, has released all the core functionalities of the world's first decentralized compute infrastructure during this stage.

Remember, W3bstream is chain agnostic. In Devnet Seed, W3bstream supports IoTeX and Ethereum while the team works on the BNB chain, Polygon, and other L1 future integrations.

Devnet Seed allows developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) and users to monetize their device data and utility unprecedentedly! During this stage, IoTeX will host W3bstream services open to everyone who integrates the latest development updates. During this period, W3bstream also supports data ingestion from smart devices, machines, and mobile apps through IoT, data, and communication protocols.

It also supports data validation programming and processing logic with Rust, Go, C++. W3bstream is based on a Web Assembly (WASM) virtual machine. WASM is a new type of code that can be run in modern web browsers and some believe it could replace JavaScript in the future.

At this stage, users not only regain data ownership but can also truly own and control their devices thanks to the basic DID or decentralized identity for devices also implemented.

In addition, the team also releases both mobile and embedded software development kits (SDKs) to allow mobile apps and physical devices such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Pebble to connect to W3bstream seamlessly. An SDK is a collection of software development tools in one installable package that facilitate the creation of applications, in this case, Web3 apps or dApps.

Who says sequels aren't great?

And then comes Mainnet Sprout where the central focus is the scalable runtime. It is scheduled for release in Q2 2023 when we anticipate a first significant adoption with over 200,000 connected devices using W3bstream and MachineFi dApps.

Thousands of W3bstream nodes and MachineFi dApps can operate and communicate with each other at this stage, allowing thousands of dApps to function optimally.

During Mainnet Sprout, cloud resources are provisioned or removed automatically. Support for high volumes of incoming data is enabled ahead of MachineFi dApps becoming extremely popular. Also, at this stage, stream management and resource scheduling are shipped to allow W3bstream nodes autoscaling.

There will also be support for generating zero-knowledge proofs. For those not so techy, all this means is that data or information shared as proof of activity, action, transaction, or achievement by one party (the prover) is verifiable by the other relevant party (verifier) without the need for any additional information or revealing the original underlying data.

Even simpler: For example, you have the walk and earn app, and you become the prover because you have to show proof that you took a specific number of steps to receive a reward or token distribution. Without sharing your name or any other detail or information, the verifier obtains the relevant data to verify the steps taken and triggers the reward or token distribution.

During this stage, W3bstream will also integrate with decentralized storage services, potentially Filecoin, Arweave, or similar protocols, to enable permanent data storage upon users' consent.

Full decentralization

Yes! Complete decentralization kicks in with Mainnet Blossom, which we plan to release in Q4 2023. At this stage, W3bstream nodes become open to the entire community. Community members can become validators of the W3bstream network.

Mainnet Blossom makes creating a decentralized identity for IoT devices and machines more straightforward and the authorization of their data. And also, in this stage, we will integrate more L1 blockchains, which means developers can build on several MachineFi dApps, not just on Ethereum and IoTeX.

Other tools will be released, such as the W3bstream Explorer for data vizualization and analytics. Data Availability Committees (DACs), with sharding supported, will also be available during this stage.

Faster, more reliable, and scalable

Planned for Q2 2024 is the most exciting release of Mainnet Flourish for privacy and community enhancement. At this stage, the integration of privacy-preserving features such as confidential computing and differential privacy occurs.

Nobody but the owner of data or devices can decrypt their data, so no more Surveillance Capitalism or Big Brother breathing over your shoulder. That is when users and only they fully own and control their data and devices and profit from their data.

MachineFi Lab also provides zero-knowledge (ZK) tools for developers at this stage to help them easily construct ZK Snarks, which are proofs of architecture where one can demonstrate ownership of specific knowledge without disclosing that knowledge.

Mainnet Flourish is when the IoTeX's core developer team further optimizes the protocol towards high availability, high throughput, and low latency. The network becomes faster, more reliable, and more scalable at this stage.

We are confident that you enjoyed the W3bstream roadmap deep dive as we kick off our journey with W3bstream. It unlocks the multi-trillion reward economy for simply carrying out everyday activities, such as exercising, driving safely, sleeping well, being eco-friendly, visiting places, and attending events. The more data users gather, the more valuable it becomes.

W3bstream will become the backbone of the entire decentralized machine economy and will disrupt many industries improving processes, data monetization and streaming, machine network communication, and unification. IoTeX is building the internet of tomorrow, today!