By
Godfrey Benjamin
December 27th, 2023
With a view to become a smart city, Taipei partners with IOTA to provide its residents with a wide range of new technological advantages.
The IOTA Foundation announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Taipei city. This step is explained by the fact that the capital of Taiwan is seeking to reach its smart city milestones by implementing the power of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in its processes and procedures.
The IOTA Foundation is a Germany-based non-profit foundation, which activity is focused on distributed ledger technology and permissionless ecosystem development. The IOTA’s Tangle, established in 2015, is an open-source distributed ledger protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). While expanding of the IoT continues, interoperability and sharing of resources are becoming a must.
So, IOTA gives companies an opportunity to explore new business-2-business models by making every technological resource a potential service to be traded on an open market in real time, without any fees. The IOTA technology offers secure data and money transactions between machines. And it 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.
According to David Sønstebø, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation, the company is very “excited about teaming up with Taipei City”. “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”, he added.
Following the terms of the agreement, IOTA and Taipei City will develop the ways of adapting IOTA’s technology that will contribute to achieving the city’s goals of transforming into a smart city through a number of projects, enhancing data integrity and authenticity concerns in public services and other spheres.
The first project to be implemented will be introduction of digital citizen cards with built-in TangleID. The concept of these cards was designed with an aim to exclude risks of identity theft and voter fraud. Simultaneously, the digital cards will represent a simple tool for tracking health history and other data for public services.
A project that is already being carried out is Airbox. This is a joint initiative of Edimax, Realtek, Asus, and Academia Sinica, LASS and Taipei City, aimed at creation of palm-sized air sensors that will boast capacities for detecting temperature, humidity, light, and pollution. In cooperation with DLT startup BiiLabs, the Tangle protocol will be applied for the Airbox data with a view to integrate incentivized payment in IOTA. Owing to to IOTA’s technology a real-time air pollution monitoring will become possible. So, the citizens of Taipei will have a unique opportunity to get up-to-date information about pollution levels in real time.
The IOTA Foundation is planning to collaborate with the Taipei City and BiiLabs to find out more new spheres for incorporating IOTA’s Tangle and data marketplace into the smart city.
As Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation explained:
“Partnering with Taipei City lays new foundations for business models and real implementation of our technology. It is great to see IOTA’s technology implemented in a variety of scenarios that will offer true value, even affecting voting fraud.”
It’s worth mentioning that in December IOTA was reported to be one of the cryptocurrencies dominating the markets, trading app. at $5. Nevertheless, having lost a significant part of its value, according to CoinMarketCap, IOTA is trading at $2.01 at the press-time.