How Blockchain promotes the acceleration and adoption of Internet of Payments?

In a customer-oriented society, the technologies are competing with each other in convenience, quickness, security, and agility what has resulted in unprecedented acceleration of advanced technologies. Today the IoT promotes a totally interacted world where things can exchange measured data and thus create a fully connected environment. 

The IoT can be consistently referred to as the 21st-century technology changing simple appliances into smart ones, common houses seem no longer comfortable without smart facilities, cities are changing into smart cities with full integration of conventional devices and technologies.                                                                   

The IoT emerges as a bridge between operational and informational technology connecting the network of devices, and home vehicles, and all appliances embedded with electronics, software, sensors to be able to connect and exchange data. As a result, people's involvement is minimized thus providing benefits such as efficiency, quickness, convenience. 

However, the IoT has exceeded its infancy time and now it makes steps in a more mature environment. IoT solutions are being deployed in diverse areas, from manufacturing and optimizing production up to digitizing industries. Still, the most tangible impact the IoT has produced is the payment industry revolutionizing the way people buy and pay.     

The payment industry with its constant strive for development and improvement has predicted the benefits of the IoT in payments and now we have a unique opportunity to experience frictionless payments. The IoT facilitates removing obstacles and due to interconnectivity, we get a chance to enjoy the smart payments without people's interventions.

COVID-19 on its side has its own impact on the broadening of IoT’s appeal in the payment industry when all industries are going through revolutionary changes and the drastic acceleration of contactless payments methods has only served to prompt the integration in payment processes thus leading to a  new term originating from Internet of Things - the Internet of Payments. 

In short, the Internet of Payment enables payment processing over IoT devices such as automobiles, appliances, and wearables.

Now when most businesses are exploring innovative ways and services to respond to customer needs in this pro-digital time, customers invest with readiness in IoT ecosystem devices. Payments, done through specific appliances, gadgets and wearables - all this constitute the core of Internet of Payments. Together with enhanced usage of consumer electronics such as gadgets for the IoP coupled with operational and banking technologies can be referred to as the major drivers for such wide adoption of the Internet of Things in the financial services leading to the formation of Internet of Payments. The Internet of Payments contributes to increased revenues by virtue of additional volume and opening new ways of payments fulfilling. 

 However as it always happens the innovations always must overcome barriers and face diverse challenges before widespread adoption.   As it always happens the main concern that prevents the widespread adoption of such innovations is security problems. 

Since the IoT is the substantial reality of information systems and utilizes the existing wireless sensor networks technologies the privacy and security threats take their own important place.  At first instance, It can be fully said that the IoT objects'  problems begin with poor design matters when at the design and manufacturing phase the security aspects weren’t properly addressed. The lack of compliance of hardware with insecure internet connection challenges security problems resulting in the lack of secure update mechanism, guessable passwords, unpatched software, hardware issues, and other problems connected with the insufficient quality of the hardware. 

Another security problem the IoT is exposed to is DDoS attacks. Since the IoT objects utilize wireless sensor technologies consequently the ecosystem remains vulnerable to such attacks. Poor data security and privacy is the constant source of threat to the whole IoT ecosystem.  

 Therefore to safeguard the IoP system and to address major security requirements in IoP the Blockchain system is integrated into the IoT. As it comes out the IoT and Blockchain alone prove to be highly disruptive whereas the IoT requires the strengthening of its security system the Blockchain security mechanisms provide it.  Reciprocally the IoT system embodies the disruptive nature of the Blockchain system securing more ordered and well-organized work. Moreover, the use of blockchain would add an extra layer of security that creates another obstacle for hackers that are obliged to bypass for getting access to the network. 

Therefore as it comes out  Blockchain empowers the IoT devices to enhance security and brings transparency in IoT ecosystems. 

In general, the combination of the IoP and Blockchain isn’t limited just to security measures.  The IoP and Blockchain are considered to be the innovations that would improve and develop current business processes and create new business models with a shared decentralized distributed ledger that opens up opportunities to provide trust, transparent, secure payments.

 Internet of Payments enables better customer-connect, together with the larger IoT ecosystem. And herein an opportunity emerges for Fintechs and Big techs to gain an advantage in the banking and financial industry, by introducing new business models when the combination of IoT and blockchain technology are considered to improve the current business processes due to opportunities the Blockchain structure provides. Blockchain as a distributed ledger can store all kinds of information by means of which the trusted real-time transactions without intermediaries are secured thus providing fast transaction processings and coordination among billions of devices. With the increase in the number of interconnected devices the distributed ledger technology provides a solution that supports these large numbers of transactions. More transactions - more benefits and profit.

Blockchain’ brings to IoT

• Autonomy of IoT systems when IoT devices can interact with each other without the intervention of a third party due to smart contracts enabled by blockchain. 

• Coordination and Interoperability across IoT devices, due to blockchain technology when all IoT devices interact and exchange information due to layer on P2P network.

• Blockchain’s algorithms mechanisms secure reliability and traceability of the IoT data due to data blocks with history stamp saved in blockchain 

 We can see that due to the IoT - Blockchain technologies have a revolutionary impact on our lifestyle. The technologies enable full insight into the working process and smooth it. The manufacturers automate the production process and save money on labor. Daily direct transactions without intermediaries also prevent additional spends and costs. Blockchain and the Internet of Payments contribute to increased revenues by virtue of additional volume and opening new ways of payments fulfilling. And herein lies an opportunity for Fintechs  to gain an advantage in the banking and financial industry, by introducing new business models.Now we live smarter, we work smarter and we get a chance to streamline our daily life with more flexibility and agility.