- Due to the architecture of the tangle, IOTA is perfectly suited for use in the energy sector.
- IOTA offers a wide range of applications for use in the private and corporate sectors.
Wilfried Pimenta, Business Development Director at the IOTA Foundation and Founder & CEO of Alpha Venturi, presented the use cases of the IOTA Tangle in the field of Smart Cities at the online conference B4Utilities (=Blockchain 4 Utilities). The conference took place on September 14th and 15th, but all videos can be watched on this site after a free registration.
The IOTA tangle and smart citys
As we already reported IOTA is part of the research project +CityxChange, which is funded by the European Union and investigates how the Smart City of tomorrow could look like. Pimenta explained that IOTA is perfectly suited for this purpose, since its tangle architecture allows all IoT devices connected to the network to communicate and exchange data.
New challenges of the Internet of Things ecosystem, as Pimenta discussed, include the theft of identities and other sensitive data, secure sharing of corporate data across multiple systems while maintaining agreed governance, and the provision or secure sharing and selling of valuable information.
For this purpose, IOTA provides a “bridge” between the digital and physical society in order to realize new fields of application. The aim is to create a trustworthy environment in which data can be stored free of charge and micro payments can be processed. In the area of smart cities, the specific aim is to ensure access to IoT devices and to control decentralized energy marketplaces via smart contracts.
The target is to construct both old and new buildings with energy generation and transmission facilities that trade surplus energy directly with each other and thus within a block or quarter. In doing so, the trading will be handled via a decentralized energy marketplace, which should ultimately lead to energy positive cities.
The city of the future will automatically regulate all processes within the city. The IOTA Tangle enables dedicated energy meters to communicate fully automatically with all actors involved in the ecosystem and exchange important information. Furthermore, traffic in the city could be controlled by a system that collects factors such as energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, traffic congestion, proximity to charging stations and a few other parameters.
Another prominent application is the IOTA Smart Charger (already introduced in 2018), which automatically charges cars at electric filling stations and pays for the charging process. Jaguar has also developed an IOTA smart car wallet that automatically and completely autonomously interacts with other IoT devices. The following figure shows the areas where the IOTA Tangle can be used.
Digital identities are a promising future market
Especially in the financial sector, the collection of personal data for opening a bank account or checking creditworthiness is of enormous importance. The Decentralized Identity (DID) solution researched by IOTA promises to put the control of the data back into the hands of the owner.
A DID is the digital representation of collected information, which can be assigned to a person, organization or object like a fingerprint and can be verified by using the Tangle technology. According to Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA, the use of DIDs will soon be part of people’s everyday life:
The use of Unified Identity or Decentralized Identity protocols will soon become commonplace in the financial sector and public services. Distributed Ledgers are perfectly suited to serve as the underlying trust layer in the validation of a person’s identity.
