One of the exciting things in the R&D pipeline this year is work that falls under the broad heading of “soft offline”, which is solving for a diverse set of use cases like planes, trains, cruise ships, secure facilities, mines, remote villages, arctic explorations and space stations.
Each of these cases (and many more) present opportunities for transactions between parties that don’t always share complete mutual trust, operating in environments with intermittent low-bandwidth signal to the rest of the world. This is a hard area to gain traction in, because it is so close to the slippery wall of the fully untrusted offline case, which is not solvable with present day technology. Each situation has its own individual nuances that have to be explored in order to get leverage, leading to a fractal exploration of their high-dimensional surfaces.
Out of this rough terrain a set of tools and techniques are emerging for scaling these challenges and building resilient systems in the midst of the uncertainty brought by being mostly disconnected. As those are refined and focused we look forward to bringing the results into the market to provide elegant solutions for hard problems that don’t yield to conventional tactics.
— Dann