AMSTERDAM — Dubbed the 4th Industrial Revolution, the combined technologies of blockchain, AI and Internet of Things (IoT), are constantly changing and modernizing industries that seem to be stuck in the past. The automotive and mobility industry is no exception. Vehicles are becoming increasingly autonomous and connected. Before long, cities will be filled with IoT devices that allow these autonomous cars to pay for parking and electric chargers. IOTA are among the pioneers who want to make this happen, and so is Parksen.

IOTA believes that, in time, “autonomous vehicles could become their own economic agents with their own wallet and their own money”. Charged with IOTA tokens, these vehicles could pay for parking, charging their batteries or toll roads through feeless machine-to-machine transactions, without central intermediaries.

Practically, this means one would never have to get out of their car to drop coins into a parking meter ever again. The transactions would take place between the vehicle and the meter without needing action from the driver, thanks to the connection between your autonomous vehicle and a wide variety IoT devices.

This element of IoT development fits in perfectly with Parksen’s Green, Smart and Connected City Platform, which will offer a universal dashboard on which users can track, inspect and connect to these IoT devices. But this is not the only one of IOTA’s visions that Parksen feels strongly about.

Stimulating the Sharing Economy

When it comes to parking costs, Parksen wants you to pay only and exactly for the number of seconds that you use the parking spot. No unforeseen costs, no over-paying for an extra 20 minutes you don’t need and no subscriptions: you pay for what you use.

IOTA’s systems are set up in a similar if not the same way. Through machine pay, they aim to let consumers pay for what they consume, when the consume it in real-time. They believe that by adopting this new model, developers and manufacturers will be incentivized to create and construct products that last and are easily recyclable. “In short: IOTA plans to make planned obsolescence obsolete”.

Data Ownership

The Internet of Things will generate data in quantities unlike the world has ever seen. All connected devices have a purpose, from sensors that read levels of toxic emissions to cameras that monitor severe congestion and areas where accidents frequently happen. This data is useful for a wide variety of people like city planners, municipalities, companies and parking garages, and therefor it holds value.

IOTA envisions a model “where you pay micro-transactions without fees and retain the ownership of your data, which you can sell to whomever you see fit”. This ties in to what Parksen aims to do with the data of available parking that you collect. Parksen will compensate you for collecting and sharing new data with us, which will then be re-purposed towards smart and sustainable solutions that will drastically improve city infrastructure developments. The same goes for any other kind of relevant information. Like for instance noise pollution, analytics provided by your autonomous car and so on.

Tangle

As the name suggests, IOTA’s distributed ledger is a stream of individual transactions entangled together, rather than being grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains.

source: IOTA.org

Why is this interesting for Parksen? Well, compared to the Ethereum blockchain, the IOTA Tangle enables a high scalability of transactions and, more importantly, it uses a ‘pay-it-forward’ system of validations, taking away the need to offer financial rewards and making IOTA transactions fee-free.

Considering the expected amount of daily parking transactions, we are in need of a system that can actually accommodate that amount of data. Instead of parking it on one block on the Ethereum blockchain, we can spread them out over several bundled or linked transactions on IOTA Tangle, and that makes us very excited.

Future Proof

All in all, we believe that IOTA are doing an exceptionally important job in this industry. They offer high scalability, devices with low resource requirements, zero-fee transactions, secure data transfer, offline transactions and signatures that make IOTA resilient to the next generation of computing.

They are looking to the future, but not merely from the perspective of tech and IT guys. They are aiming to contribute to a society that thrives on sharing economy, trust and a kind of ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ mentality. They are looking for true sustainable and future-proof solutions that will not only change the way our cities work, they will change the way we think.

Parksen is very much looking forward to creating such kind of solutions together with IOTA and their platform. Let’s see what the future holds in store for us all!

Cheers,

Jan Heemskerk

Content Manager at Parksen