In January, Taipei signed a partnership agreement with the Germany-based IOTA Foundation to explore smart city solutions based on Tangle. IOTA is based on a distributed ledger technology called Tangle, that enables data and money to be transferred via its network. It offers secure data and money transactions between machines and has been already applied in millions of micropayments and use cases like secure Over-the-Air Updates, transparent value chains, and fee-free micropayment-based electric vehicle charging, etc.
IOTA is being tested in the automobile, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. Recently, Bosch (A German electronics giant and leading IoT patent holder) became one of the first multinational firms to invest heavily in IOTA. Volkswagen announced in January that their Chief Digital Officer, Johann Jungwirth, is joining the Foundation’s Supervisory Board, a hint that prospective collaborations with IOTA for the development of decentralized platforms and smart cars will take place in the near future.
BiiLabs (Blockchain Industry and Innovation Laboratories), a blockchain technology startup dedicated to the use of decentralized ledger technologies to drive business innovations, announced the official launch of their decentralized digital asset solution TangleID for corporate users. The TangleID system allows users to have “self-sovereign” verifiable digital identities based on blockchain technology, which is a software implementation scheme designed for Digital ID and GDPR regulations. This has already been adopted by ‘Taipei City Digital Citizen Cards’ project.
IOTA and Taipei City will develop multiple ways to adapt IOTA’s technology so as to contribute towards achieving the city’s goal of transforming itself into a smart city through a number of projects and authenticity concerns in public services and other spheres. Yichen Chu, aka Lman, co-founder and CEO of BiiLabs, said: “Based on IOTA, we have delivered the infrastructure to establish digital identity and credentials, and provide users with reference to mobile applications and website integration.”
The initial project will put in place a digital identification system based on IOTA’s TangleID technology. As Taipei’s Smart City Living Lab initiative enters its proof-of-concept phase, the city will soon roll out a new identification system—the Digital Citizen Card, which is designed to safeguard citizens from identity theft and voter fraud. The identification system could eventually be used in other public service domains such as document and record tracking in the healthcare industry. The prospect of “Digital Identity (Digital ID)” urges Taipei City to develop digital Citizen Cards in order to integrate online to offline (O2O) services for identity verification. The Digital ID opens up new possibilities for the access of industry services and provides flexibility regarding services or the payment on the service chain of identity authentication. The establishment of the platform for verification, service, payment as well as the well-established permissions for API will speed up drastically.
Taipei is already successfully conducting another experimental project with RealTek. They have deployed about 150 “Airboxes” around the city that collects and shares air quality data. The city is planning to integrate Tangle technology into these Airboxes with an incentive fee, paid in IOTA, for citizens with low carbon footprints.
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