Nodle Acquires Brickchain.com to provide IoT Manufacturers, Smart Cities and Large Enterprises Compliance With Privacy Regulations

IoT For All

San Francisco, CA ⁠— March 5th, 2020 ⁠—Nodle, an eco-friendly wireless network built to connect and secure the Internet of Things, announced that they acquired Brickchain.com (Brickchain) for an undisclosed amount in equity and Nodle Cash.

With this acquisition, Nodle is able to provide IoT manufacturers, large enterprise customers, and Smart Cities compliance with GDPR and CCPA data privacy regulations and a more secure IoT network.

Brickchain, based in Europe, is a pioneer in securely managing and protecting identities. Brickchain’s infrastructure provides a safer solution for users and consumer electronics manufacturers, as well as for government institutions, by converting devices and user activity into cryptographic facts (proof and record of what happened). Brickchain had thus far raised $3 million in funding.

Nodle and Brickchain logos

As part of the acquisition, Brickchain founders Declan Caufield and Lars Larsson will join the growing Nodle team. Caufield will reinforce the management team as Head of Security and Privacy, and support Nodle’s efforts to productize and market its security protocol to large enterprises, consumer electronics manufacturers, and governments in the IoT space. He will additionally oversee Nodle’s compliance with the new regulations around privacy. Larsson, an experienced infrastructure architect and developer, will join the engineering team and work on the integration of the Brickchain protocol into the Nodle infrastructure.

“Brickchain is a timely acquisition for Nodle that will further enable and accelerate Nodle’s continued rapid growth,” said Caufield.  “Brickchain can provision services, applications and identity through its self-sovereign jurisdiction, called Realms. This truly distributed architecture transcends blockchain’s limitations by providing exceptional scalability, without compromising data privacy.”

“Brickchain is a secure federated application framework and protocol that provides service providers (e.g. manufacturers), users, and devices with a robust trust mechanism,” added Larsson. “It is massively scalable by design, as each Brickchain Realm can establish its own independent relationship with trusted shared services whilst maintaining end to end user privacy, something that is extremely hard to do with blockchains. It is a great fit with Nodle’s infrastructure and chain.”

The acquisition is an important step towards leadership in the industry for Nodle.

Even with the massive number of hacks, scandals, and privacy laws being enacted globally, there is no industry-standard, and secure access control in today’s IoT infrastructure to better authenticate devices and encrypt data in a way only users can access the data.

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have been selling raw data for years, and there are no guidelines or handbook on what to do to protect users’ privacy; simply because it has barely been considered.

A few weeks ago, Amazon’s Ring Camera team stated they will now allow users to opt-out of data collection by 3rd parties. This was only after the EFF (Electronic Frontiers Foundation) brought this to light.

“We are poised to lead the way to better manage the data generated by connected devices, dramatically increase scalability, and provide enterprise customers, industrial and consumer electronics manufacturers, and Smart City entities with a stronger privacy model,” said Micha Benoliel, Nodle’s Co-Founder and CEO.

About Nodle.io | The Citizen Network

Nodle is building the world’s biggest eco-friendly wireless network to connect and secure the Internet of Things. The Nodle solution is low cost, privacy-first, and 100% software, with no need for any hardware. The network stack rides on top of the existing global smartphone infrastructure, seamlessly stitching together Bluetooth (BLE) connectivity provided by app developers, OEM partners and our mobile app users. Our privacy-first networking stack enables for a multitude of applications, ranging from smart assets and security certificates, to insights for consumer electronics manufacturers, enterprises, smart cities, and the financial and advertising industries. Nodle has over 5M DAU smartphones on its network which connect and see hundreds of millions of IoT devices in over 80 countries. Nodle is backed by Blockchain Ventures, Blockchange, BootstrapLabs, Olymp Capital, Blockhead, Workplay Ventures (Mark Pincus of Zynga), and a group of angel investors.

For more information, visit http://nodle.io or follow us on Twitter @nodleteam.

Press contact:
Daren McKelvey
daren@nodle.com

Investor contact:
Micha Benoliel
micha@nodle.com

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IoT For All
IoT For All
IoT For All is creating resources to enable companies of all sizes to leverage IoT. From technical deep-dives, to IoT ecosystem overviews, to evergreen resources, IoT For All is the best place to keep up with what's going on in IoT.
IoT For All is creating resources to enable companies of all sizes to leverage IoT. From technical deep-dives, to IoT ecosystem overviews, to evergreen resources, IoT For All is the best place to keep up with what's going on in IoT.