The Taipei municipality in collaboration with IOTA Foundation has launched the first-ever blockchain-based identification system. The launch follows an announcement earlier this year that the city was working with IOTA and local startup BiiLabs on a proof-of-concept plan.

The project involves a visual identification system called a Digital Citizen Card and is one of many projects in a series dubbed the “Smart City Living Lab“. The system is designed to assist in the reduction of identity theft and blockchain voter fraud but also exhibits potential for use in many other areas, including data sharing for sensitive files such as medical records.

Wei-bin Lee, the Commission of the Department of Information Technology, spoke at a presentation on the new system and lauded the IOTA Foundation for their unique and innovative technology.

We welcome the IOTA Foundation to Taipei City and are excited to embark on the future together,” he said.

IOTA Foundation co-founder David Sonsteb announced his excitement at being involved in the project, stating that they are ‘just beginning to scratch the surface’ of IOTA’s possibilities in an ever-more connected smart world.

IOTA is built on what it calls ‘the tangle‘, a technology which differs slightly from a traditional blockchain system. It is also a distributed ledger that logs transactions but operates as a data structure that moves in one direction without looping back, called a directed acyclic graph (DAG). It is more complex than the single array of a blockchain and involves every device on the system working to maintain the ledger.

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