MetaStreme: Automated payments for IoT world, whether you understand Bitcoin or not

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It’s time Bitcoin gained a usable interface to help high-volume data users process information—even if they’re unfamiliar with the Bitcoin world. Enter MetaStreme, a “wallet” aimed at the Internet-of-Things (IoT) world.

MetaStreme comes from the creators of WeatherSV, one of the first Bitcoin services to demonstrate the feasibility of high-volume, small-fee transactions broadcasting continually to the blockchain. The new service aims to broaden WeatherSV’s scope to any enterprise-tier service relying on that constant flow of information.

MetaStreme is a “wallet” in that it handles and broadcasts Bitcoin transactions, but don’t expect to see the kind of features or interface you’re accustomed to seeing in mobile and desktop apps. According to its description, MetaStreme is “not a typical wallet with a user interface, instead it is a scalable framework for executing high volumes of autonomous transactions.”

It has a simple API for outside apps to interact with the BSV network without the user needing a great deal of Bitcoin knowledge. It has the ability to handle key management and UTXOs, and provide SPV proofs. There are data indexing services, dynamic fee rates, support for IoT devices and a “robust transaction engine”—all can be fully automated once set up and funded, without human interaction.

Partners with an IoT interest

MetaStreme will launch with a group of partners who’ve expressed an interest. They include Predict Ecology, Farm in ONE, OpenLedger.systems, TheMakers.org, Aii, Mempool, and of course WeatherSV.

Speaking to CoinGeek, MetaStreme and WeatherSV founder Paul Chiari said IoT development is accelerating rapidly. Adding programmable money to networks of IoT devices can only increase their usefulness.

WeatherSV itself has been a BSV showcase, and often appears at the top of lists showing transaction volumes on the BSV blockchain. Though often referred to by those with a misunderstanding of Bitcoin’s potential as “a weather app”, WeatherSV has seen many from outside the Bitcoin world take an interest. They include anyone whose business activities or leisure pursuits are dependent on weather conditions—everyone from farmers to surfers and more.

Read our interview with Paul Chiari below to hear more about his vision for MetaStreme, what it can do, and for more details about the testing and release schedule.

Interview with Paul Chiari, founder of MetaStreme

How did you come up with the MetaStreme concept? Was there a Eureka moment, or ideas that evolved over a longer time?

The MetaStreme concept evolved over time out of necessity more than anything. The original framework we put together to broadcast our transactions lacked the ability to scale much further than our current requirements. Direct broadcasts to miners also presents challenges which we needed to mitigate against. Essentially as most of the tools for BSV have evolved from BTC the ability to scale them out to millions of transactions per day to take advantage of the network capacity was not possible.

What level of technical knowledge is required to use MetaStreme?

MetaStreme requires no working knowledge of Bitcoin. Through our API you just send us the signed data (output) and MetaStreme will take care of the rest.

What’s the roadmap for beta testing and public launch? (Or in other words, when will it be available?)

At this stage we hope to conclude our private testing by the end of next week at this point we will have a testing platform available on STN allowing developers to test their applications and the MetaStreme integration without cost. We have been somewhat overwhelmed by the response to our test phase so we will have to implement a process and timeframe to stagger our integrations. During this time we will move WeatherSV to MetaStreme and make the mainnet version available for testing and hope to be live in about six weeks’ time.

In the time since WeatherSV’s launch, have any parties outside the Bitcoin world approached you to discuss potential use cases? (If so, who were they?)

We have had numerous such discussions about everything from flying, surfing, sailing and other weather dependent pursuits to industries that rely on weather data such as agriculture and energy sectors and even a teacher that has utilised WeatherSV for educational purpose. It has also worked well as a demonstration tool for us to highlight to others how Bitcoin can be used for more than just payments leading to some innovative potential use cases for a range of other unrelated industries.

You were kind of a trailblazer in BSV by demonstrating the value of high-volume data transactions at a time when a lot of people didn’t fully appreciate the concept yet. What lessons have you learned from the experience that you can share publicly?

MetaStreme is essentially a culmination of much of what we have learnt over this period. Many of the current tools available for interacting with the network will have a limited usefulness as the size of the chain continues to grow. In the near future storing and scanning the entire chain will become much less trivial than it is today so utilising SPV and nodes that only care about specific transactions will be important for applications built on BSV.

“IoT” sounds like one of those concepts we’ve been hearing about for years, but remains a “coming soon” idea for a lot of people. Is that true? Where are we now on that timeline?

IoT is a very broad term that encompasses many things and can facilitate endless applications. Typically they are devices connected to the internet for the purpose data transmission or automation. As a user rarely interacts directly with the device they may not consider they are utilising the technology however even checking the weather relies on a global network of IoT devices collecting and transmitting that data.

The primary barrier to entry has been ubiquitous access to power and communications available at the location where devices need to be deployed. New forms of wireless communications being rolled out extend coverage areas with networks supporting low bandwidth applications and reduced power requirements. As the barriers to entry are reduced the use cases continue to expand which I think will lead to exponential market growth in coming years.

Can BSV accelerate IoT development?

Currently the pace of development in the IoT space far outweighs anything happening within BSV and I think it is much more likely that integration of IoT will accelerate BSV development and adoption. Having said that much of our original concept stems from the belief that IoT will benefit overtime from utilising the BitCoin protocol. The power of programmable money in delivering a value chain supporting M2M and other economies down to the level of micro transactions will be a game changing use case for IoT in our opinion.

Some of your launch-time partners (eg: environmental, agricultural industries) aren’t the kind we’d “traditionally” associate with Bitcoin. How can we teach Bitcoiners to think outside the box more, to find new types of markets to work with?

I view technology as little more than a set of tools to solve real world problems. If a technology fails to deliver on this then it will likely disappear. The first 10 years of Bitcoin has achieved very little, not even getting much traction as electronic cash. Bitcoin only survives longer term if it provides value to the wider world, where people interact with it many times a day without realising. BTC and much of the entire space is just one big developers playground held hostage by the continued state of flux.

Scaling the network and locking down the protocol enables business to build with confidence. As a professional provider of IT solutions I know that successful projects rely on properly assessing the business needs first then applying the best technologies to deliver on the requirements. All too often I think developers are essentially working inside out, failing to properly evaluate product demand or how it improves an existing process.

Calling MetaStreme a “wallet” might confuse some thanks to preconceived notions of what a Bitcoin wallet is/does. Do you have any ideas for a better term to describe it?

Yes we do use the term wallet at this stage for lack of a better word. In essence like other wallets our system handles the processing of the transaction from the data inputted however it is not a typical wallet that would be used to store and spend funds. Possibly a better term might be a ‘transaction processor’ but that may also cause some confusion with [transaction processors] such as TAAL that are using this term to describe their changing business model.