IOTA’s Tangle Protocol to Transform Taipei into a Smart City

IOTA has partnered with the city of Taipei to help create a smart city based on the IOTA networks’s Tangle ledger. One of the first steps is the issuance of Tangle-based ID cards to the citizens of Taipei, the IOTA Foundation reports.

“The first project will be digital citizen cards with built-in TangleID. As Taipei City’s Smart City Living Lab opens to proof-of-concept projects, IOTA’s ultimate secure distributed ledger technology could help Taipei City’s digital citizen cards from being tampered with, allowing citizens to feel at ease without worrying about identity theft or fraud when voting, providing background medical record information, or using any government-related service.”

Distributed ledger-based identification cards provide a wide range of use cases.

“It is great to see IOTA’s technology implemented in a variety of scenarios that will offer true value,” said IOTA Foundation co-founder Dominik Schiener.

The potential applications of a Tangle-based ID card system might be further expanded when connected to other smart city systems.

Taipei City has already been trialling the “Airbox” data marketplace system. This takes the form of hundreds of small sensors, currently found in homes around the city, and 150 Taipei City elementary schools. These detect temperature, humidity, light and pollution.

Together they’re one of the most comprehensive environmental sensor networks on the planet.

The data they’re collecting will be put on IOTA’s Tangle to create an incentivisation platform for the sharing of this information, plus live air pollution monitoring to be used by all PM2.5 stations (particulate air pollution measurement stations) in Taiwan.

“IOTA is one of the innovative players in the cryptocurrency world because of its unique technology,” said Wei-bin Lee, Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology in Taipei City Government. “With Taipei City always thinking ahead and with IOTA’s technology, this partnership is a strategic move to usher in the era of smart cities to the citizens of Taipei. We welcome the IOTA Foundation to Taipei City and are excited to embark on the future together.”

“We are so excited about teaming up with Taipei City,” said David Sønstebø, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation. “It proves that our next-generation technology is ready for real-world use cases and is more than just a theory. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the effect IOTA can have on making the world of IoT ever-more connected and paving the way for not just smart cities, but a smart world.”

IOTA isn’t the only cryptocurrency launching smart city trials in 2018. IoT competitor Waltonchain has partnered with a subsidiary of China’s state telecom service to roll out smart city trials in Zhangzhou, and ICON’s 2018 roadmap shows a modular shift towards smart cities in Korea.