This post originally appeared on the Hyperledger Foundation’s blog. You can read the full case study here. 

Some years ago, researchers realized that IoT devices would need to buy and sell from one another. In this “Economy of Things,” the items to be traded will include power, data, and connectivity. Most transactions will be fast, low value, and high frequency.

For a company like The Bosch Group that’s active in everything from autonomous vehicles to thermal plants, the Economy of Things will touch many lines of business. That’s why, in 2017, the company’s advanced research group, Bosch Research, was looking to find a way to scale up blockchain transactions to support the Economy of Things.

Bosch set out to do meet that requirement by leveraging a specific, step-by-step open source strategy for developing new markets:

Identify a requirement
Set goals
Consider the terrain
Build a partnership
Pick a suitable license
Use open source archetypes

The goals were to lead an effort to create standards for the Economy of Things and to build a framework where different partners could work together.

A survey for likely partners led the Bosch team to Perun, an early layer-2 protocol that passes state information off-chain through virtual channels. Bosch joined forces with several academics to implement this protocol and start creating an ecosystem.

As part of the process, Perun needed a stable home where everyone could access the latest code, and other people could find it. Hyperledger Labs provides a space where developments can be started without the overhead of creating an official Hyperledger project.

In Q3 2020, Perun was welcomed into Hyperledger Labs, and development has continued with work from the team at Boch and PolyCrypt GbmH, a startup spun out of the Technical University Darmstadt, where much of the academic research behind Perun began.

The Bosch team was eager to talk about its approaches and contributions to Hyperledger Foundation. To that end, they worked with Hyperledger marketing and others in the Perun community on a case study that details not only the business and technology challenges they’ve set out to tackle but also the strategic way they are leveraging open source development to advance the industry for all.

We never know what technology will turn into the Next Big Thing.

Perhaps Perun will be one of them, powering billions of micropayments between IoT devices or enabling people to shop with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) that are still on the drawing board today.

Read the full case study here.