Update #4 — Beta release
Further to the teaser we published earlier this month, here is a full debrief of our progress developing Bytes, with two small demos and some prediction of what is to come next.
Since the Alpha release, we have split our team in two. One half specialises on the building of an IOTA based IoT Internet access trading stack. This is a Linux + JavaScript stack (JS is great for IoT too). The other half of the team is working exclusively on our beautiful mobile app.
Intro: What is Bytes?
Bytes offers a platform for last mile, distributed, Internet access trading. Last mile means we are not substituting ourselves to regular ISPs, and distributed means the trade is not intermediated. No third party is involved in processing or enforcing the transaction, not even ourselves.
Having a platform for last mile, distributed, Internet access trading enables to:
- Do away with roaming by enabling locals to sell their excess Internet access to travellers (we will make sure this is compliant) — when was the last time you used up your 100GB monthly limit?
- Enable machines (or “Things” in the IoT parlance) to transact with one another. Indeed, connecting billions of machines to the Internet is nearly impossible for today’s centralised offerings. A distributed, programmable payment stack is needed.
IoT Stack
We have built a solution that enables IoT devices to sell Internet access one to another in a distributed way. We used Raspberry Pis to simulated an IoT cluster.
Goals
The two requirements for our IoT stacks were that:
- The solution runs on Linux, and
- The solution has a pure P2P architecture.
It is developed on a Linux platform for at least two reasons.
- First, as far as network applications are concerned, Linux is the favoured Operating System, and
- Embedded devices mostly use Linux distributions.
Implementation
We used Linux’ network utilities, IOTA.js, and Electron. Electron enables to build desktop applications with JavaScript.
Using Electron means we do not need a webserver to host the dashboard, which enables us to maintain a fully distributed architecture. There is no server to cause delays, so everything gets done a bit faster.
