Bosch, Cisco, BNY Mellon and other innovative Fortune 500 companies have teamed up with blockchain startups to set up a blockchain consortium in order to discuss and work on the use cases of blockchain in securing and improving ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) innovations.

The formation of the consortium follows the December meeting that saw representatives from a group of industry-leading startups and discussed the challenges facing blockchain and IoT applications and the potential for a collective effort to address them. The group said that they will collaborate to develop a shared blockchain protocol for the internet of things.

The consortium members include Ambisafe, BitSE, Chronicled, ConsenSys, Distributed, Filament, Hashed Health, Ledger, Skuchain, and Slock.it, along with Fortune 500 corporations BNY Mellon, Bosch, Cisco, Gemalto, and Foxconn.

“We called together leaders in the blockchain, hardware, software, venture capital, technology, and finance to discuss the barriers to interoperability and security within IoT and how we can complement existing IoT platforms with a blockchain back-end.  We believe there is a real value proposition here for IoT, supply chain, and trade finance,” Skuchain Co-founder Zaki Manian, mentioned.

The blockchain technology industry consortium will move forward in defining the scope and implementation of smart contracts protocol layer across various major blockchain systems. The consortium’s functioning is voluntary at this stage with intent to emphasize on the fast moving open source collaboration.

The blockchain IoT consortium one such collaborative efforts by large companies exploring blockchain potentials, like R3CEV that has over 60 members including around 40 banks and financial institutions. The new consortium will highlight on how companies could make bigger moves in blockchain this year.

“We are seeing tremendous potential for the application of blockchain in industrial use cases. Being able to create a tamper-proof history of how products are manufactured, moved and maintained in complex value networks with many stakeholders is a critical capability, e.g. for quality assurance and prevention of counterfeits. This must be supported by a shared blockchain infrastructure and an integrated Internet of Things protocol,” Dirk Slama, Chief Alliance Officer at Bosch Software Innovations, said.