Exploring blockchain solutions for smart cities and human mobility to improve quality of life

Imagine a new city environment that uses technology to guarantee us safe and congestion free transportation, creates efficiencies, smarter energy infrastructure, improves sustainability, protects the environment, and enhances the quality of life for its citizens.

According to the UN, 50% of the world lives in urban areas and is projected to be 70% by 2050. That’s an increase of two billion people in the next three decades. Building additional infrastructure to accommodate city peak demand like rush hour or concert traffic is incredibly expensive and not practical. Sustainable urbanization and quality of life increasingly depends on the successful management of existing infrastructure.

The MOBI Grand Challenge (MGC), launched October 2018, and is loosely modeled on the DARPA grand challenge for autonomous driving which captured the public imagination and launched the autonomous driving revolution. The MGC runs in bi-annual phases over a three-year-long tournament.

By the end of the third year, winning teams will be expected to demonstrate how blockchains and related technologies – distributed ledgers, cryptography, tokens, and consensus mechanisms can leverage the connections and computing power of smart cities. The ultimate goal of the challenge is to create the first viable, decentralized, ad-hoc network of blockchain connected IoT and smart infrastructure that can reliably share data, participate in transactions, coordinate behavior, and thereby improve human mobility.

Building on the success of Phase I, Phase II – Citopia – explores new solutions for human mobility to create smarter and greener cities while improving quality of life. MGC envisions a tokenized Citopia ecosystem where city governments work with employers, schools, universities, and local businesses to create incentives for changing behavior to build smarter cities.

Tokens earned for participating in the ecosystem can be exchanged for goods or services donated by a local business or government agencies, or donated to a charity of choice. Congestion pricing can easily be incorporated into token reward structures to reduce peak demand for mobility, or even electricity and water.

All can be done with a phone app built with a blockchain backbone. This can be used to calculate carbon footprint reduction, percent of citizens using greener commute, gas & maintenance cost reduction, it will also keep track of benefits to local businesses through increased commerce from Citopia incentive program.

In Citopia, gamification, tokenization, and fun competitions create powerful individual and collective incentives for socially responsible behavior.

Available Toolkits

Developers will be provided with mobility data within major cities, such as Los Angeles and Singapore, to utilize for their smart city creation. With help from the Intelligent IoT Integrator, or I3, and Ocean Protocol, developers will have access to a number of city data sandboxes to support their Citopia application. Learn more about each contributor in the Resources section.

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