Exclusive Interview with Raullen Chai, Co-Founder and CEO of IoTeX

Exclusive Interview with Raullen Chai, Co-Founder and CEO of IoTeX

Raullen Chai, a Ph.D. in cryptography from the University of Waterloo and with prior engineering roles at Google, Uber, and Oracle, leads IoTeX. He envisions DePIN—decentralized physical infrastructure networks—connecting IoT devices and blockchain to empower users with data ownership. IoTeX 2.0 aims to cater to developers, enterprises, and consumers, bridging the gap with modular tools like W3bstream and token primitives.

Raullen discusses IoTeX’s goal of onboarding 100 million devices in the next 3–5 years. The strategy involves partnerships with hardware manufacturers, community-led DePINs like DIMO and GEODNET, and empowering grassroots adoption. By expanding developer onboarding and scaling middleware, IoTeX plans to achieve this ambitious target.

Raullen highlights the importance of the ‘Identity’ layer in the DePIN reference architecture. He emphasizes the need for secure and interoperable machine identities to establish trust in decentralized physical systems. IoTeX’s ioID provides devices with programmable identities, revolutionizing trust in DePINs.

W3bstream, a specialized solution for DePINs, focuses on verifiable real-world data ingestion. Unlike general-purpose off-chain compute solutions, W3bstream is tailored for handling physical-world inputs like sensor data and geolocation, bridging the gap between the physical and digital realms.

With ioID’s NFT-bound smart contract wallets for machines, IoTeX addresses lifecycle events like hardware replacement and identity migration. By combining secure hardware enclaves and on-chain NFTs, IoTeX ensures auditable continuity and composable trust in device identities.