IOTA’s Smart city strides

Summary

IOTA is partnering with cities, starting with Taipei, to implement smart city initiatives using its Tangle technology for improved efficiency, security, and sustainability.

Abstract

The IOTA Foundation has partnered with the City of Taipei to develop smart city solutions, leveraging IOTA's Tangle technology to address scalability issues prevalent in traditional blockchain platforms. The collaboration aims to enhance city functions, drive economic growth, and improve residents' quality of life through the use of Big Data, Machine Learning, Process Automation, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Two key projects, TangleID and Airbox, are underway to provide secure identification and real-time environmental data, respectively. The EU has also funded a multi-city project led by IOTA to create energy-independent cities, indicating the potential for widespread adoption of IOTA's technology in smart city developments across Europe and beyond.

Opinions

The author suggests that IOTA's Tangle technology is superior to traditional blockchain in addressing scalability issues, facilitating high transaction volumes without performance degradation.
The partnership between IOTA and Taipei is seen as a significant step towards achieving smart city goals, with the potential to set a precedent for other cities globally.
The creation of IOTA was motivated by the need to support IoT, not just as a cryptocurrency but as a foundational technology for a new digital economy.
The author expresses optimism about the future impact of IOTA's smart city initiatives, anticipating that they could lead to sustainable cities with energy independence and pollution-free ecosystems.
The article implies that the success of the smart city projects, especially in Europe, could lead to the mass adoption of blockchain-based Tangle technology.

IOTA’s Smart city strides

The concept of Smart City has been gathering momentum recently with the City of Taipei partnering with the IOTA foundation (Jan. 2018) to achieve the smart city goal initiatives. There is a multitude of smart city definitions that you will find out there, but simply put it uses the combination of emerging technologies like Big data, Machine Learning, Process automation & most importantly Internet of Things (IoT) to streamline the city functions, drive economic growth & make the lives of the residents better. IoT allows the sharing of data, resources & services between the interoperability of all the connected devices which will be a key part of the new digital economy.

This is where IOTA came in the picture — although popularly known as the Cryptocurrency IOTA currently a member of the Crypto Elite sitting at number 9 by Marketcap the motive behind the creation of this digital asset was to be the backbone of IoT. It is no secret that blockchain is considered to be the flag bearer of a transforming mechanized economy but there is a huge roadblock in the form of scaling issues which hinders its quick adoption. Creators of IOTA wanted to fix this issue precisely.

IOTA is based on a technology called Tangle or Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which basically addresses the issue of scaleability in the traditional blockchain-based Cryptocurrencies utilizing the PoW (Proof of Work) protocol. Tangle basically accomplishes this by allowing two validations at the same time any transaction is added on its network. This allows the Tangle network to carry out high transaction volume without choking or slowing down.

The city of Taipei is currently working on two projects with the IOTA — TangleID & Airbox. TangleID tech aims to create tamper-proof ID cards for the citizens of the city to eliminate the chances of identity theft & voter fraud. It will also work towards creating a database to store the private and public records of the citizens. Airbox, on the other hand, will use data sharing technology to provide real-time information on temperature, light & pollution to the residents of Taipei collected from the sensors installed around the city.

After the successful partnering of this real-time use case of IOTA based smart city initiative, the interest has spread westwards. The IOTA foundation led by the +CityxChange consortium has been granted a multi-city project by the EU (European Union) with approved funding of 20 million Euros.

The main aim of this flagship project is to create energy independent cities that produce more energy than they consume by utilizing peer-to-peer energy trades. Cities of Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru intend to become the smart cities employing this technology. The project is expected to kick off on Jan. 01, 2019.

The success of these smart city projects specially in Europe may very well lead to mass adoption of Blockchain-based Tangle technology across other communities & cities in Europe and elsewhere. Sustainable cities with Energy independence & Pollution free ecosystems might soon become a reality.

Originally published at www.datadriveninvestor.com on July 11, 2018.