Engineering technology company Bosch is leading an upcoming blockchain-based digital mobility project backed by the German government, which has been demonstrated live at the 2023 IAA Mobility show in Munich, Germany.
At the event, Bosch, together with its partners MOBIX and the Peaq blockchain, announced a peer-to-peer parking and charging solution utilizing moveID on the Peaq ecosystem.
MoveID is autonomous identity (SSI), built on the blockchain, allows autonomous transactions between vehicles and connected infrastructure. IAA Mobility’s demo highlighted autonomous transactions between connected devices – in this case smart cars, charging stations and parking signals.
Cointelegraph traveled to Munich to speak with moveID project lead Peter Busch, product lead for distributed ledger technology (mobility) at Bosch, and Leonard Dorlöchter, co-founder of Peaq, to better understand how blockchain can help drive the future of mobility. .
When asked why mobility is the right sector to start implementing SSI on a large scale, Dorlöchter points out, “Mobility in particular has a lot of fragmentation.”
When it comes to mobility, the user’s goal is to move from one point to another. This is done via public transportation, micro-e-scooters, car sharing or private cars, which all require parking spaces and charging.
“There are a lot of players involved and there is always a need to sign up with new accounts, new cards, etc. If this happens on an open ecosystem like blockchain, then everyone can have a seamless experience and Find the best services, best parking spaces and charging points.”
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Busch believes that decentralized identity for projects on open blockchain networks is “the most promising technology” because:
“Decentralized identity allows you to authenticate and identify devices without the need for intermediate or other super scans in the background.”
“This is the ultimate data sovereignty because users own their data and save and control it,” he said. “In the charging use case, you can only see the user and the charging pile in the car doing this business, and there are no other parties around.”
Busch said one of the main goals and motivations for the project is to standardize technology integration with other automakers in Germany and throughout Europe.
He also commented that the mobile industry is a good example for big companies and other players in the industry, how Web3 and decentralization can help with data and privacy compliance and the European GDPR.
“EU governments are planning to require everyone in the EU to have a decentralized identity card in the future.”
“Anyone who can download it will have access to what we are developing. It will be available to all citizens and businesses who want to use it,” he said.
All this is part of a larger EU-funded initiative called Gaia-X, which aims to create a federated, secure data infrastructure for European digital sovereignty and lay the foundation for future smart cities.
Therefore, Busch emphasizes the importance of “designing systems that people can easily use.”
“Any citizen will probably have this automatically in five to eight years without having to think about it because when you put your personal ID as a card in your wallet today, it’s going to exist somewhere digitally or electronically.”
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The smart city of the future envisioned by these projects will be a network of “connected things” that will need to have identities and open systems, the Peaq co-founder said.
“If we look to the future and think about smart cities, they won’t work and function if they are built on the Web2 platform we know today.”
“Things come alive with an identity – it’s their passport,” he said. In the case of IAA Mobility, this is smart cars, charging stations and traffic lights. “Once you have that identity, users can find them and identify them. Then you can really create a smart city.”
“The Internet of Things (IoT) becomes the Economy of Things (EoT) because all these things have some economic value and that is the future. The future of AI automation will be economic activity and machines will do what is needed to support society . ”
Creating IoT and EoT is akin to nation building in the digital space. Dorlöchter concluded by saying that in order for this to happen, these systems must be “open and decentralized systems.”
Most importantly, they need to have an interoperability component that allows “everyone to participate in the benefits.”
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