Bosch and Dapps company Peaq Network expressed their belief on how the future of IoT and the Economy of Things (EoT) will come via decentralisation and on-chain automation. This came ahead of a demo at IAA Mobility in Germany where the tech company showed their plans to combine the two through a mobility.
With backing from the German government, Bosch Mobix and Peaq Netowork showed their progress on a system allowing a peer-to-peer parking and charging scheme utilising the Peaq ‘moveIDs’ ecosystem.
MoveIDs act as self-sovereign identities (SSIs) built on the blockchain, permitting autonomous transactions between vehicles and connected infrastructure. The demonstration at IAA Mobility highlighted autonomous transactions between connected devices: a smart car, charging station and signal for parking. This, for example, could allow drivers of a sufficiently smart car to park a smart bay and be automatically charged rather than having to get out and pay for it separately.
Transport is an area that is seeing smart implementations across the board. Scooters, ride shares, bike shares – the industry is seeing these monetary transactions on a scale like few others.
And that’s why they decided to focus on this industry, says Leonard Dorlöchter, co-founder of Peaq Network. “There are many players involved and always requiring sign-ups with new accounts, new cards, etc. If this is happening on the blockchain, an open ecosystem, then everyone can have a seamless experience and also find the best services, best parking and charging spots.”
Working on a decentralised blockchain could enable a large degree of interaction between say a smart car and its surroundings without the need of signing all the separate T&Cs of each provider due to things like smart contracts inherent to the system.
Peter Busch, project lead for moveID and product owner for Distributed Ledger Technologies Mobility (a Bosch thinktank) told how these identities of items on open blockchain networks are the most promising technology. “Decentralised identity allows you to authenticate and identify devices without having the intermediate or another hyperscalers in the background,” says Busch.
“This is the ultimate data sovereignty because the user owns their own data and keeps it and controls it,” he said. “In use cases of charging, you can see only the user and the charging pole in the car make that business – no other party around it.”
Busch said one of the main goals and motivations of the project is to standardise the technological integration with other automotive players in Germany and across Europe.
This broader idea of individual decentralised ID interacting with other organisations is what the EU government’s having been working on implementing. Bosch’s plans are part of the same EU-funded initiative Gaia-X, which intends to see every person in the EU assigned a decentralised ID in a secure and federated data infrastructure that promotes interoperability among European businesses and public-sector organisations. Using a decentralised network of Cloud and data services, it hopes this system will lay the foundations for future smart cities.
Dorlöchter believes this system is what will really see smart cities as we envision, work. “If we look into the future and think about smart cities,” says Dorlöchter. “they wouldn’t work and function if they were built on a Web2 platform as we know them today.
“IoT turns into the EoT because all of those things have some economic value and that’s the future. The future of AI automation will be economic activity, and machines will do what’s necessary to support society. That is why decentralisation is key,” Dorlöchter concluded.
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