IOTA News Roundup: Partnerships, MOUs, and R&D

IOTA has had an eventful couple of months, having fulfilled a few of their roadmap milestones (such as the launch of their Trinity mobile beta wallet) as well as a few surprises (IOTA ecosystem and Qubic).

Here we take a look at some of the recent high-profile developments in the IOTA-sphere, and where they could lead in the future.

Volkswagen Announces Smart Cars Powered by IOTA

It’s always exciting when a blockchain project partners with a household name, and on June 11, IOTA brought the blockchain (or, rather, the Tangle) one step closer to mass adoption. At the Cebit 18 Expo in Germany, together with Volkswagen, IOTA demonstrated a proof of concept (POC) for interconnected vehicles that can update their software in real time.

The first IOTA-powered Volkswagen car is scheduled to launch in 2019, to join the estimated 250 million smart vehicles expected to be on the road by 2020. In addition to live updates, the transparency, speed, and decentralization of IOTA’s Tangle technology will enable defective cars to be quickly reclaimed and other issues to be addressed immediately.

The Chief Digital Officer of Volkswagen, Johann Jungwirth, expresses his faith in IOTA being up to the task:

“Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are crucial for the future of trusted transactions. IOTA has great potential to become a DLT leader with the Tangle approach.”

The Launch of IOTA Tangle-Based Citizen ID Card

Back in January 2018, the IOTA Foundation partnered with Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, to help transform Taipei into a smart city. Fast-forward to June, Taipei announced they are working with Bii Labs, a startup focused on DLT, on a digital identity system, based on the IOTA Tangle, that will be released later in the year.

This is notable as it’s the first time a blockchain project will be used on a state level for identification verification. The cooperative measure will result in citywide digital ID cards, making Taipei the first to undertake such a measure.

Once in place, these IDs will hopefully eradicate personality-based crimes such as identity theft and voter fraud, and go on to serve as the foundations for digital forensics and billing systems.

Taipei is well on its way to becoming a smart city built entirely on the blockchain, as IOTA technology is already being tested in monitoring the city’s air quality. With the Air Box project, every home in Taipei will have sensors to detect humidity, temperature, light, and pollution. The data will be recorded and analyzed by the IOTA platform, and families will be incentivized to comply with regulation levels.

David Sønstebø, co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, expresses excitement about the direction this partnership could take them:

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 and SinoPac Sign MOU

Another exciting partnership IOTA has secured is with SinoPac, one of Taiwan’s largest financial holding companies, which functions throughout the Asia Pacific region.

SinoPac has been testing the waters in terms of distributed ledger technology for a while, and they finally decided that IOTA’s capacity for zero-fee microtransactions and decentralized record-keeping fits perfectly with its mission.

On June 20, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding to solidify their partnership.

Currently, SinoPac is working on a notary certification solution, iCertification, which encrypts documents in both the public and the private sector and utilizes a digital fingerprint and private user key. It then generates a QR code and unique digital certification for each user, and all data is stored on the IOTA Tangle.

Tina Chiang, SinoPac Senior Executive Vice President, expresses optimism in what IOTA’s technology has to offer iCertificate:

iCertificate is an always needed notary service in digital certification application, not only in education or public utilities territories, but in trading and supply chain industries… With IOTA’s support, iCertificate was developed as a flexible and extensible service, which efficiently consolidates the bothersome landscape of many individual and different digital certification authorities into one platform.

Moreover, the Head of Business at the IOTA Foundation, Winifred Pimenta de Miranda, has this to say with regards to the use of the IOTA Tangle in the notary certification sector:

It not only demystifies IOTA’s potential to use the Tangle in a wide variety of corporate products and services, but also demonstrates the increasing practical and real world usage of distributed ledger technology in the financial sector. SinoPac’s cutting edge innovation is showing how DLT can improve and enhance the security of data-sensitive services and we are looking forward to continue to explore new digital innovation landscapes made possible by the IOTA Tangle technology.

What’s Next in Research and Development

In the wake of these exciting developments, IOTA is making a push to be more transparent in their plans for the future.

While they are not ascribing deadlines to their roadmap milestones on principle, as they have determined hard and fast dates will hinder the development process, they have outlined the “why” behind the “how.”

They have pinpointed the 5 areas they hope to strengthen in their next big R&D push, with each new project hopefully addressing at least one of these aims:

Network – Strengthening and the IOTA infrastructure

Decentralization – Standing behind their philosophy of a distributed ledger

Dapps – Practical applications of the IOTA Tangle and including developers

Cryptography – Honing their techniques

Adoption – Applying IOTA to practical situations to encourage mass usage

A list of the R&D projects they’re working on can be found on this blog post.

IOTA is certainly running on a surge of momentum and productivity, which will carry them through to the end of Q2. What the second half of 2018 has in store is anybody’s guess, but we’re excited to find out!

Related: Why Qubic is a Big Deal for the IOTA Ecosystem