A screenshot showing Chronicled's participation as of last Friday.
According to Chronicled, the new open registry is initially focused on classifying and organizing devices that are embedded with BLE and NFC microchips.
“Chip companies, physical IP creators and brands can now register and verify their BLE and NFC chips on a public blockchain,” said Chronicled CEO Ryan Orr. “These tamper proof chips can be ordered today and are already being deployed in consumer goods.”
For the growing legions of product developers interested in adding IoT functionality to their devices, Chronicled’s registry could be a solution to one of the IoT’s biggest pitfalls, interoperability. As it stands now, most companies are developing their own siloed chip registries, making it very difficult for third parties to develop ancillary devices that could augment or even enhance other products. Now, some companies might want to preserve their ability to be the sole developers of cool new extensions for a device, but there is merit in allowing a third party to create a killer app that a product development team may have never considered.
With open-source tools, users will be able to “register chips to the blockchain, associate chips with physical products and build apps with smartphone scan and authentication functionalities,” said Maurizio Greco, Chronicled’s CTO. All of the tools needed to add a device to the registry, including starter kits, SDKs and a registry explorer, can found at www.chronicled.org.
As of this writing, Chronicled’s new registry has amassed 6,244 “things” in its registry. Though the company only has 11 participants so far, it’s likely that the registry’s number will grow given the number of product developers, both large and small, who could benefit from greater IoT interoperability.