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Waltonchain, a Chinese project, was established on November 30th, 2016. It is a decentralized platform that integrates the internet of things into blockchain using RFID technology. They have a unique RFID chip that is able to read/write directly to the blockchain without human intervention.
This creates a real decentralized blockchain enabling trust and traceable business ecosystem. It also allows information transparency and data sharing. Walton Chain aims to combine RFID and blockchain technology to help manage supply chains. It basically decentralizes the supply chain and provides info on products.
It also wants to build upon IoT by incorporating blockchain tech. RFID reader chips and RFID tag chips are used in waltonchain. The RFID reader is a node on the chain. The RFID tag is the connected device to the chain.
The RFID hardware system is the main reason that makes waltonchain a great business model. This can prevent bottlenecking in commercial applications on the blockchain.
What is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)?
RFID is a tag that is attached to any object. The RFID is better than barcodes because it does not require any line of sight to be read by a sensor. This makes is easier for machines to read them without having to scan the direct code. Some uses of RFID include animal tracking, toll booth auto pays, and tracking a shipment.
Pros of Waltonchain
- Tech – Their combination of hardware (RFID chip), software, child, and parent blockchain technology is truly unique. Their RFID chips can hold private keys and can generate transactions on chips. They are bringing value to the business world by allowing businesses to start their blockchain product with ease.
- Impressive portfolio of partners – Some big companies can bring a large sum of money into Waltonchain.
- Big team – Their team is quite impressive, one of the biggest team’s on a project to date. This is very reassuring considering that they bring a massive amount of experience to the project.
- Coin utility – The Waltonchain Ecosystem WTC will have multiple functions listed below.
- Issuing sub chains
- Dividend interest
- Credit and mortgage system
- Distributed asset exchange
- Distributed voting and governance system
Cons of Waltonchain
- Marketing – They aren’t focused on marketing their product. This can slow the project down as a whole especially while other companies continue to push further into blockchain. Neo also had bad marketing when they first started but once they have gained attention, they moved up rather quickly. Then you have coins like Electroneum and TRON coin who have all the marketing in the world and shoot up very quickly with no product.
Frequently Asked Questions
This FAQ was taken from the Reddit thread, Waltonchain-All-In-One.
Q:Total Supply of Waltoncoin (WTC)?
The Total Supply is 100 million coins with no further issuance in any case. The Max Supply is currently 70 million coins, with the remaining 30 million left to be mined over the course of many years. Currently, the Circulating Supply is around 25 million.
Q:Is Walton moving to its own blockchain?
For now, WTC is an ERC20 token, but when the Genesis block of Walton’s main net has been mined, the token based on Ethereum will be replaced by the actual Waltoncoin with the exchange rate of 1:1 (Q1 2018). You can either leave your coins on the exchange, and they will take care of the switch for you, or you can leave them in your MEW wallet, and the team will snapshot your wallet and create a new one with the same address with the real coins.
Q: How can I move my WTC to MEW?
I. Send your WTC to your wallet address.
II. Add a custom token using the information below:
Address: 0xb7cb1c96db6b22b0d3d9536e0108d062bd488f74
Name: WTC
Decimals: 18
Q:What if I want to keep them on my Ledger Nano?
You can do that, and the team will still snapshot your wallet and copy it; however, there is no Ledger support currently. What that means is, if your wallet is snapshotted, the only way to access your coins initially will be to expose your Ledger’s private key. I don’t recommend doing this, as it compromises the security of your Ledger. If you plan on moving your WTC around, I recommend sending them to a MEW wallet now before the snapshot takes place.
Q:What’s the utility of WTC? What is the coin’s value?
In the WaltonChain Ecosystem WTC will have multiple functions:
- Issuing sub chains
- Dividend interest
- Credit and mortgage system
- Distributed asset exchange
- Distributed voting and governance system.
Q: Is Waltonchain a platform?
Yes. Waltonchain is a smart contract platform that will have ICOs and dApps.
Q: What else does Walton do besides track clothing in the supply chain?
Walton is capable of implementation in smart cities, smart waste management systems, etc. Walton is not so much a “supply chain” coin as it is a Big Data one. RFIDs are used to gather data which is very useful in supply chain management. In addition, it can be used to combine with smart devices and have an Internet of things network.
Q: Are there any patents?
The Walton team has many patents in chip design, but the main one of interest is the Transaction ID-reading RFID chip with memory storage. This allows the blockchain to be implemented in the Foundational layer through the RFIDs themselves. This makes WaltonChain fully decentralized and secure.
Q:What are the advantages of the RFID IC tag chip designed in this project?
Existing RFID chip industry cannot meet the development of Internet of Things applications, especially applications for the Value Internet of Things:
- Transmission power and stability need to be improved.
- Reception sensitivity is low.
- Anti-interference ability is poor and the transmission power is low.
- The existing RFID ICs have many problems such as high power consumption, poor matching with antennae, and difficult system integration, etc.
- High security: The chip integrates asymmetric random password pair generation logic, uses a core asymmetric encryption algorithm with independent intellectual property rights, and an optimized design without increasing the cost and power consumption of the chip, enabling higher communication security.
- Tamper-resistant: A dedicated storage space is integrated into the tag chip for the storage of hash value of tag status and key information.
- Optimized anti-collision design: The chip uses a binary tree anti-collision algorithm with independent intellectual property rights and a time division multiple access design, significantly improving the tag recognition success rate and the number of identifiable labels at the same time.
- Few options available while the prices are high.
- High sensitivity: The chip uses an optimized noise suppression technology to improve the noise figure at the receiving end and the overall receiver sensitivity, which plays an important role in increasing the recognition success rate.
- Good compatibility: The chip can achieve high-frequency and ultra-high frequency functions at the same time, so the end customer can read the information through their smart phone and inquire about reliable product information.
- Long lasting: The chip adopts a low voltage and low power-consumption design, allowing the chip to last more than 20 years.
Q: Why does this need a blockchain?
“It is difficult for the Internet of things under the current central structure to accomplish real autonomous cooperation and effective transactions, because the relevant parties of such cooperation and transactions often belong to different stakeholders with complex and uncertain trust relationships. Therefore, the collaboration and transactions of the current Internet of Things devices can only be carried out under the same trust domain. That is to say, the devices to collaborate and trade must be provided or verified by the same Internet of Things service provider, which significantly reduces the true commercial value of the Internet of Things applications.” (Whitepaper)
To expand, counterfeiting is an obvious answer to this question. There needs to be a way to truly authenticate an item. Blockchain is that answer.
Walton’s blockchain also removes data silos. Companies won’t have to manage any database anymore. Everything is handled by Walton. Walton uses child chains which are separate from the parent chain. Companies can keep proprietary information secret and private on their child chain, and only broadcast necessary information to the parent chain for public viewing. Blockchains make the sharing of info between companies easy and fast, too. And then obviously, blockchains have perfect transparency and are immutable.
Smart contracts are also extremely useful. In the supply chain industry, after perfectly counting and storing inventory, things can be auto-ordered and paid for simultaneously with WTC just as an example. Your mind can come up with a whole host of other ideas related to automation.
Furthermore, decentralized, transparent, and immutable data for things like smart waste management systems, which Walton has designed, and air-pollution monitoring systems in smart cities would benefit greatly from the blockchain, for reasons explained in the first point from the whitepaper.
You could also imagine on the customer end that wanting to know where all their goods come from is important. This is in line with counterfeiting, but also with things more benign. Imagine wanting to return an item to a store, but can’t remember which grocery store it was from. Lots of simple improvements like that are all use cases for blockchain.
Q:How much do the chips cost?
Waltonchain in a nutshell with COO Monitor Chan:
“We develop and produce hardware such as chips ourselves. This really differentiates us from other companies at the moment. Basically, Silitec, our technical support company, was founded in 2015 and is specialized in manufacturing chips. They already have a R&D team of around 20+ people, so in that way we are not ‘increasing’ cost. Next important detail is that Waltonchain’s blockchain technology is written into our chips. This means that unlike traditional RFID chips that have their own specific ID and cost around $0.15 to $0.20, the chips we develop will be below 5 cents. With the volume of sales increasing, the overall cost will spread over many units, and the system’s cost and ID’s cost will go down consequently, or simply put, economics of scale will do the work.”
Conclusion
Waltonchain seems like a great project with a real-world use case. This is huge in today’s cryptocurrency world as many of the cryptos are useless and copy off of other’s blockchains. Waltonchain looks to have a great business plan, team, and many partnerships.
The only thing they are lacking is marketing, but this is the least important aspect to the Waltonchain team. As Waltonchain continues to do great things in the future, it will capture more attention and become bigger in the crypto space. This is one of those projects to look out for in the next few years.