Breaking IOTA Announces Alvarium, an Oracle Collaboration With Dell

Updated by Ryan Smith
In Brief
  • The IOTA Foundation and Dell Technologies have introduced a solution for measuring the trustworthiness of data.
  • Dubbed Alvarium, the project creates trust scores between IOT devices.
  • The Alvarium project is ambitious given other established competitors like Chainlink.
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On Feb 11, the IOTA Foundation revealed a new collaboration with Dell Technologies called Alvarium. The project intends to measure the trustworthiness of data.

According to the press release, Dell first introduced the idea in 2019, calling it Data Confidence Fabric. It later adapted the technology using the IOTA streams framework, leveraging the trustless nature of blockchain solutions.

Alvarium will record the flow of data as it moves between Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The IOTA cryptocurrency partly takes its name from these devices, describing itself as the “first distributed ledger built for the ‘Internet of Everything.'”

IOTA recently introduced oracle capabilities as demand for reliable, decentralized off-chain information continues to grow. Alvarium appears to be a competing solution to other established players like Chainlink, which already has a substantial head start.

“At a time of vastly increasing data volumes, the trustworthiness of the data that drives these decisions is difficult to assess. Project Alvarium provides a measurable way of evaluating the confidence in data before it is used by an application.”

IOTA Oracle Solutions

Blockchain oracles are third-party services that provide information from the external world to on-chain smart contracts. They are heavily used, for example, in the emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) landscape.

Alvarium will reportedly assess each data interaction and assign it a trust score on the IOTA tangle to “prevent tampering.” IOTA cites the coronavirus pandemic as an ideal test-case for the tech, however, the project still appears to be in the early stages of development.

“The upcoming demonstration paves the way for initial integration into hardware or software, and is principally aligned with industries or organizations that require a high level of compliance or supervision. It is an industry proof point that trust on the edge can be measured.”

The IOTA cryptocurrency has had somewhat of a checkered past. Despite claiming to be decentralized, developers suspended the network in Feb. 2020 following an attack on its Trinity software wallet.

And in December 2020, critics bashed the project after founder David Sønstebø stepped down from the IOTA Foundation. It has nevertheless soldiered on and expanded into a very ambitious niche of the cryptocurrency space.

The IOTA Foundation, Dell, and Intel will demonstrate Alvarium in a public webinar on Feb. 24.

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