Iota vs. Ripple: A Comparison Inside An Economy of Things Architecture for Industry 4.0

The increase of the number and different types of devices within the Internet of Things context and the emergence of cryptocurrencies are bringing challenges, opportunities, and changes. How these technologies will impact the current business and economic models are still unknown. This work proposes an architecture aiming to use these new opportunities to enable the M2M interaction for Industry 4.0. Our work, used as base the novel paradigm called Economy of Things, focused on how to digitalize, monetize, and exchange assets inside the IoT context. An experimental environment was designed to explore and compare the characteristics of the cryptocurrencies Ripple and Iota. The initial results showed the Iota transaction time 9143% slower than Ripple and finished with a difference of 3707%. Also, while Ripple did not present transaction errors, in the last test configuration Iota had 4.3% of unconfirmed transactions, and 14.3% of requests needed to be resent. Although the Ripple network charges some fees, the cost to do 18,600 transactions was USD 0.05490. We considered it a small price to pay for a more stable network.