WiMi Hologram Cloud Inc (WIMI)

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WIMI plans to build a manufacturing-as-a-service MaaS system platform based on distributed ledgers.

Source
https://cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/7651844612/1c815e20402001fz8h?from=finance

March 7, 2023

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a recently emerging concept that has attracted attention with the arrival of wireless 5G technology, and has already shown a huge impact in the manufacturing field. In recent years, industrial manufacturing has undergone tremendous technological changes, from digitalization and automation to intelligent manufacturing. How to maximize production efficiency and profitability in the manufacturing process is the focus of every manufacturing enterprise. With the development of society, the form and form of manufacturing have also undergone tremendous changes, from the previous large-scale to the present refined and personalized. On the one hand, customers need more customized products and on the other hand, manufacturers need to realize flexible manufacturing in order to meet market demand.

WIMI (NASDAQ: WIMI) is also exploring a new model to seize the opportunity in the market opportunity of industrial intelligence and personalized transformation - to develop a new platform mechanism, manufacturing as a service (MaaS, Manufacturing as a service) service). Under the mechanism of the platform, it can be roughly divided into production demanders and equipment providers. Different demanders can use production equipment and machines provided by different suppliers in the factory to realize the value of the platform. For the demand side, personalized orders can be realized without purchasing large-scale equipment, and for equipment providers, it can further increase the utilization rate of equipment and generate greater value.

In order to realize this pay-per-use business model, WIMI (NASDAQ: WIMI) adopts distributed ledger technology (DLT) to establish decentralized trust and traceability. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) can provide a safe and transparent way to track goods and transactions throughout the supply chain. DLT can provide an immutable record of all transactions in the supply chain from raw materials to finished products. This can help manufacturers track the condition of goods, reduce fraud and errors, and increase transparency and traceability. And create a tamper-proof record of the quality control process and inspection results, which can help manufacturers ensure that their products meet the required quality standards and regulatory requirements. DLT can be used to automate contract execution and payment processes, reducing the need for intermediaries and increasing efficiency. WIMI researches potential DLT technologies in order to efficiently and intelligently integrate DLT-based solutions in the manufacturing environment, hoping to make it a common framework for adopting DLT in the manufacturing industry, realizing collaborative sharing of manufacturing, reducing energy consumption and improving collaboration efficiency.

WIMI's manufacturing-as-a-service MaaS platform based on distributed ledgers includes four key parts.
Distributed Ledger System
This component includes all the modules to build various functions of DLT technology, such as consensus, smart contracts, data authorization, identity management and peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. These components need to ensure that every change to the ledger is reflected in all replicas and provide mechanisms for securely storing data generated by IoT device and parameter configurations. Distributed ledger technologies with different characteristics may have different target applications, and DLT nodes can be located anywhere and connected to the base station through the Internet.

Physical host
This component consists of industrial robots, equipment, and IoT sensor devices that collect data and publish to a distributed ledger for statistics and analysis.

Factory edge node system
DLT-based solutions provide important countermeasures to protect data from tampering and support the distributed nature of IoT, but the large amount of data generated by sensors and the high energy consumption required to verify transactions make these programs unsuitable for direct execution on resources. Deploying edge servers with high computing resources can be used to process real-time applications and further increase the degree of privacy (eg, cloud computing). An edge network is a potential entity that can cooperate with the DLT network in computationally heavy tasks and return estimated results (e.g., from solving proof-of-work, hashing, or algorithmic encryption) back to the DLT network for verification.

Foreign Service
Devices in manufacturing environments are usually resource constrained, with limited storage space and low computing power. Therefore, external infrastructure running at the edge can be incorporated to provide external services such as storage and computing. For example, the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed file storage system that can store data generated from IoT networks and return a hash value to the ledger based on the content of the data. Since the ledger cannot process and store the vast amount of manufacturing data collected by sensors, machines, and robots, the services provided by IPFS are an important component. Configure IPFS privately in a local cluster. Second, we apply payment channels to shared manufacturing use cases due to their natural advantages. Specifically, a payment channel is a process in which a customer can make multiple transfers with, for example, a factory operator, without sending a transaction to the DLT. Once a final transaction occurs between participants, the payee can receive funds by submitting a final transaction to a smart contract on the ledger. This allows both parties to avoid fees involved in multiple transactions. A smart contract can be an agreement on the lease time, a specific task between the customer and the plant operator, or a smart contract created at the beginning of the payment process. Additionally, digital identity management (DID) can be added to support managing the identities of participant devices in a distributed manner.

It is reported that WIMI believes that the current general trend in the field of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is to apply digitization and automation to manufacturing plants of cyber-physical systems, and more and more smart devices with sensors and actuators are integrated into in industrial automation process. At the same time, manufacturing plants are building local edge computing infrastructure to provide resources for advanced computing.

It can be said that WIMI (NASDAQ: WIMI) builds a manufacturing-as-a-service MaaS platform based on distributed ledgers, laying the technical framework foundation for the next generation of IIoT applications. The main economic driver behind the development of this technological framework is increased production flexibility. Provide customers with smaller batches and more personalized products. In the manufacturing-as-a-service (MaaS) model, manufacturing equipment can be utilized more flexibly and leased by many demanders who use machines provided by different suppliers in the platform. This can drive manufacturing plants to increased technical complexity and require increased system reliability, intelligence and trustworthiness during operation. Build a truly collaborative industrial Internet of Things, in which manufacturing equipment in various factories is ubiquitous and interacts automatically, without manual intervention, and operates independently, efficiently and safely on a large scale.