A Comparison of Hurify and IOTA as an IoT Marketplace

Hurify is a decentralized smart contract platform that aims to connect clients and developers interested in building innovative Internet of Things (IoT) products and solutions. Through the use of Hurify, clients ensure that their IoT projects are managed by the best developers the market has to offer, at the best rates, and that the process runs smoothly. Developers, on the other hand, are able to present themselves to potential clients while honing their IoT development skills and are even able to monetize on leasing hardware owned.

IOTA enables companies to trade their technological resources as a service on an open market in real time. It is positioned as a public, permissionless IoT backbone that allows for true interoperability between varying devices.

While IOTA has no special focus on IoT, its service offerings do include the possibility to use it as an IoT marketplace. In this article, we will compare these two platforms to investigate which is better placed as an IoT marketplace, and why there’s room in the industry for an IoT-exclusive market platform.

Comparative Overview

Features Hurify IOTA
Decentralization Platform Ethereum Blockchain Proprietary Tangle
Security Cryptography-based Proprietary – Compromised security
Stability Stable, well-established, proven platform Unstable
Capability as a Service Yes No
Hardware as a Service Yes Yes – Special chip required
Data as a Service Yes Yes
Smart Contract Yes No
Extensibility Yes No

Decentralization Platform

Hurify is a blockchain platform that is offsetting IOTA’s promises of a new technology with a working platform on top of an already established Ethereum blockchain.

IOTA uses a “tangle,” which is based on a mathematical algorithmic concept called a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). IOTA doesn’t have a working, stable tangle yet. However, they claim that devices can be hooked on to their tangle. So far, IOTA has failed to demonstrate that their consensus (or “general agreement”) algorithm works, whereas blockchain has already proved its worth.

Security/Stability

Cryptography as a science and discipline has taken years to perfect. So much so that anyone in the industry knows you never try to create your own, unless you want to go through the same growing pains that all cryptography has gone through — years of it being broken over and over and decrypted over and over.

The founders of Hurify, through their parent company Mobodexter, are IoT specialists and bring with them a wealth of overall technical experience, while leveraging off proven blockchain technologies such as the Ethereum blockchain to manage security.

IOTA employs as-yet-unproven cryptographic constructs that will take time to gain trust or a following in the market. Moreover, the ternary system used by IOTA is less efficient on all currently produced CPUs and microcontrollers.

Capability as a Service (CaaS) / Hardware as a Service (HaaS)

Hurify users are IoT-specific and have access to the entire range of IoT devices, hardware, and software solutions on the market, and can network with sellers to find the right products and services at the right price.

IOTA is specialization-agnostic and does not draw specifically draw IoT clients or developers to its platform. IOTA also needs a special chip on IoT devices for it to work. Hence, hardware adjustments is a necessity for compatibility. The need to put an expensive chip in every device on the platform is not a cost-effective solution if IoT development is to scale.

Data as a Service (DaaS)

Hurify users can sell their data through the platform’s DaaS feature, which is known as data monetization. Blockchain is a tried and true technology, so from a security point of view, data sharing on Hurify, an Ethereum-based platform, affords users peace of mind.

IOTA users are also able to sell their data over the IOTA Tangle. However, since the Tangle is still unstable and insecure when compared to more settled technologies, data sharing over IOTA remains a big security threat until such time that these issues are addressed.

Smart Contract

Ethereum is a smart contract-based platform that allows for the seamless creation of decentralized applications. The only issue facing Ethereum is the length of transaction times required to process blockchain transactions. Hurify addresses these transaction time issues by employing Truebit technology. Truebit decreases the transaction times by handling blockchain transactions off-chain, before bringing them back on-chain.

While IOTA has placed smart contracts on their roadmap, the platform does not, as yet, possess this feature. The reason behind the absence of smart contracts can be found in the underlying technology, especially with regards to timestamps. The tangles IOTA makes use of are graphs with only partial order structures, making it impossible to establish correct time orders for transactions. Thus, at current, IOTA misses out on the important role smart contracts play in blockchain applications, including Hurify’s service offerings.

Conclusion

Although Hurify, at present, has a market valuation of US$25 million to IOTA’s US$11 billion, its stable working platform marks it as a worthy challenger in the realm of IoT technologies.

Hurify focuses on the fundamental problem that is preventing the scale of IoT expansion, such as skill and cost issues. Hurify’s Phase 1 platform implementation, which goes live in Q1 2018, supports service monetization. Phase 2, planned for Q2 2018, focuses on hardware monetization in order to help developers monetize their hardware resources for IoT development.

Finally, once these two fundamental issues are addressed, Hurify will then be in a position to focus on addressing data monetization in Phase 3. To learn more about Hurify’s phased approach, Blockchain-Powered IoT Marketplace Hurify – What is Next?

Hurify’s trusted platform enables developers, who are spread out globally, to get paid securely for their contribution towards product development. Thanks to Hurify’s IoT marketplace, any concept can swiftly be converted to a prototype at a comparatively low development cost if offset against traditional IoT development.

One example of this could be contracting a range of service providers from different contributing companies in the IoT ecosystem. Effective talent search and secure, on-time payments are a few of the additional features that make the Hurify platform unique.

To learn more about Hurify, read What is Hurify?, The Team Behind Hurify, and Hurify ICO: Support the Future of IoT Development.