Ruff Chain

What is Ruff Chain?

Ruff Chain is an innovative platform that allows for commerce to be improved by combining the technology of the Internet of Things and Blockchain technology. Their platform enables a connection from the virtual world to reality through their P2P network and different consensus mechanisms.

The Team

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Just yesterday, RUFF won the "Most Potential Project Award issued by GBLS", and the COO, Zhou Yan, was invited to deliver a speech on Supply Chain Finance in the Blockchain Era!

I have been following this project for a while now, I actually read about it back during their ICO, which actually sold out in private sales; I believe they sold 37,500ETH in that initial seed round. I think one of the biggest things they need to change on their main page is some of the info about their team. It would make it much easier for the typical investor to go into their website and look further into their team members by finding out more details about their work history by providing LinkedIn profiles. It's something fairly subtle, but by saving time for investors, it would really help them out in the long run. I also think that it would do them justice by not only showing the 8 members on the webpage, but giving some form of hint that they have about 50 team members working on this project! Putting this aside, I wanted to focus in on their Founder and CEO, Roy Li, and one of their investors/advisors, Alex Goh.

Roy Li

Mr. Li first decided to bring together his love of the Internet of Things and Blockchain back in 2014. Prior to this, he worked as the director of Research and Development for Nokia in North America. His prowess in the IoT field also got him an award in 2016 where Ruff OS (Ruff Operating System) won the championship in the venture competition at TechCrunch.

Alex Goh

Mr. Goh is one of the early investors and advisors for the Ruff Chain project, and he has an impressive amount of past experience in the field of IoT. For over a decade, he worked with Dell. After working with the team at Dell, he moved on to 360 Cloud Company where he became the President of the organization. 360 Cloud Company is an affiliate of Qihoo 360, which is a company that is in charge of starting up the Cloud development for different organizations. For about the last year, Mr. Goh has been a part of the team at Fosun Group. His expertise and connections to organizations and individuals in the IoT field all over China.

The Platform

Before diving into how the interoperability works for Ruff Chain, it is important to note the platform that Mr. Li released a couple years ago- Ruff.io. The Ruff.io platform enables individuals to create and deploy IoT applications extremely easily.

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You are able to download the SDK/OS from their website where you are then able to build the application. In a recent interview, he was asked about why he wanted to develop Ruff Chain, because he started off building Ruff back in 2014. He started off by building a Ruff OS, which can be found here: https://ruff.io/download.html. After about 3 years developing that project, Mr. Li realized something, "it occurred to me that, we should combine blockchain with IoT, since they share many things in common. Then, I shifted from classical PE investment to digital assets investment." About 6 months later, Ruff Chain was born. So how does this platform function?

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The way that the RuffChain platform functions is to connect the nodes to the blockchain to create an open ecosystem and enable different IoT devices to interact and connect with each other. Within these nodes, there are four different types of nodes that are classified:

Light Node
Full Node
Representative Node
Control Node

Light Node

The Light Node, otherwise known as the Executors, is the interface for the different applications. An example of this could be as simple as releasing the property rights or exchanging them between hands.

Full Node

The Full Node, which are the Recorders, records all the information applicable and allows them to vote for other nodes. All of the "Recorders" function in a DPoS consensus mechanism. Some of the different devices that would include the Full Node are HTPCs (Home Theater PCs- just your typical PC), routers, as well as NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Representative Node

These are also known as the "Arbiters", and their functionality is very similar to a PoW style, where you "mine" and distribute blocks to receive revenue. This is basically the DPoS algorithm.

Control Node

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The control nodes are probably the most important and innovative part of the decentralized nodes. These nodes have a certain amount of computing power, and they store all the transaction data onto the blockchain. One of the big differences between this node and the others is that it doesn't need to be online 24 hours a day. Use cases for this are smartphone applications and "smart" home appliances.

Roadmap

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RuffChain has completed a lot since its inception back in 2014 and should be extremely proud of themselves! They have recently implemented the consensus mechanism, allowing for a small portion of the token to be mined ~10%. Going forward, I am most excited for the project to have a clustered network of nodes. Having this scalability, and being able to bridge the IoT with the blockchain is a huge deal for enterprises. This is where RuffChain will be a big deal in comparison to larger name projects like IOTA. In the words of the CEO, Roy Li, "Our clients need “faster” products, and other projects need to reach the “enterprise level”. What I mean is not a demo in a lab, and that takes at least 5 years, but we’ll get it somewhere late next year."

The Token

The Ruff ecosystem is built around their ERC-20 token, RUFF, which currently has a circulating supply of 921,800,000 RUFF, and a total supply of 2,000,000,000 RUFF. Some of the utilizations of the token by the team can be found here:

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The use of the RUFF token within their platform will be used for incentives within their ecosystem as well as for spending and trading. When exchanging data or property through transactions over the blockchain it will end up consuming RUFF tokens. In addition, "Use of equipment rights and data generating transactions will also be settled using tokens. Any Ruff-based smart contract can claim its own token for settlement." For example, if someone is looking to receive information or generate something from another node in the ecosystem you will need to pay tokens in order to generate the transaction.