Edgence: A blockchain-enabled edge-computing platform for intelligent IoT-based dApps

Nowadays scalable IoT management is a bottleneck of IoT development due to the geographically dispersed distribution, fragmented ownerships, and ever-growing population of IoT devices. To intelligently manage massive decentralized applications (dApps) in IoT usecases, Edgence (EDGe + intelligENCE) is proposed to use edge clouds to access IoT devices and users, and then use its in-built blockchain to realize self-governing and self-supervision of the edge clouds. Edgence proposes to use masternode technology to introduce IoT devices and users into a closed blockchain system, which can extend the range of blockchain to IoT-based dApps. Further, masternodes do good to scalability by raising the TPS (transactions per second) of the blockchain network. To support various dApps, a three-tier validation is proposed, namely script validation, smart contract validation, and masternode validation. To avoid energy consumption resulted by blockchain consensus, Edgence proposes a random but verifiable way to elect a masternode to generate each new block. The potential of the tailored Edgence is shown by examples of decentralized crowdsourcing and AI training.