Blockchained Mobility Hack — Munich, Germany
On the 20–22 July 150 participants got together for two and a half days of hacking for the Blockchained Mobility Hackathon hosted by Datarella. This hackathon brought together a huge number of players in the Mobility industry with the theme: Competition & Collaboration.
The major sponsors BMW Group, Volkswagen Group, Bosch, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Telekom, Amadeus and the IOTA Foundation provided both industry specific knowledge and technical expertise to the teams competing. See WIRED magazine’s coverage for a dive into motivations around the event.
During the weekend 14 teams worked with mentors from the industry on problems facing the Mobility industry. The aim was to develop disruptive solutions using new Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), namely IOTA and Ethereum. The solutions presented for judging showed the versatility and impact that DLTs can have on Mobility.
Representing the IOTA Foundation at the event was IOTA’s Head of Mobility: Alisa Maas, Technical Analyst: Jan Pauseback and Director of Ecosystem: Me!
We were thrilled by the enthusiasm of the developers and maturity of the solutions presented from just 36 hours of hacking. Also present were a number of community members from Munich who both participated and coached at the Hackathon.
Out of the 14 competing teams, 9 used IOTA in their solution. It was great to work with directly with developers who were new to the technology and help them build solutions that both made sense from a DLT perspective and had real world impact. In the end, all three of the winning solutions used IOTA!
Lets quickly go over the solutions at the hackathon which used IOTA to solve problems in the Mobility Industry.
Technology:IOTA
In short: Provides payment and dynamic pricing mechanisms for mobility providers and consumers over IOTA.
Mobility context: On-demand mobility services are increasing in prevalence. Generally, these platforms create silos of mobility service providers. For a user this means more applications to download and multiple mobility platforms for a multi-segment trip.
The Solution: Mobility-as-a-Service is a platform that aggregates mobility providers offering users a single platform to request mobility services. The solution utilised IOTA to advertise mobility services and integrated payments directly.
Technology: Ethereum & IOTA
In short: A better way for drivers of electric vehicles to find, access and pay charge points. (via decentralization and thereby cutting out middlemen in the value chain.)
Mobility context: Charging an electric vehicle is still quite inconvenient for most people — for different reasons. One of the problems with EV-charging is that between finding, getting access and paying a charging station, a number of middle men are involved. Depending on which app you use to find a charge point, the price might be very different.
The solution: “Distributed Dingsbums Finder” enables charge point owners to put their charge points on a platform that is owned by no one and thereby get rid of middle men between EV drivers and charge points for more transparent and lower prices.
Technology: IOTA
In Short: Earn IOTA by publishing camera image data as training data for autonomous vehicles.
Mobility context: The prevalence of autonomous vehicles is increasing. These vehicles need millions and millions of miles of training data in order to train their systems to drive better. Currently the industry is using dedicated vehicles to collect this information or small but existing fleets. However, the amount of data coming in isn’t enough.
The Solution: Pac-man on Wheels uses dedicated Dash-cam type hardware and IOTA micro-transactions to incentivise the mapping of trajectory patterns for manned vehicles throughout cities. The system uses cheap but specialised hardware for point-cloud capture, IPFS to store that information and IOTA to reveal the data and receive payment.
Technology: IOTA
In Short: On time KYC system that reveals only the required information when needed.
Mobility Content: With more and more mobility service providers providing unique and useful services, a user navigating these services is subject to undergo Know Your Customer (KYC) process. This ensures the user engaging a service is who they say they are. This process is often tedious for the user and expensive for the company.
The Solution: Moby is a solution which enables a mobility provider to skip the KYC process for each user reducing cost and improving user experience. It achieves this by providing tools to an identity issuing body (Government, DMV etc) to create user controlled Verifiable Claims. This allows a user to share the pre-screened KYC data backed by the issuing body.
Read more about the concepts from one of the team members:here
Technology: IOTA
In short: Vehicles post information about accidents on the tangle so that drivers in the vicinity know about them.
Mobility context: There are still too many accidents on the roads and until autonomous driving is here there are still many things that we can do to make our roads safer. To achieve this we need our vehicles to communicate better with their environment.
The solution: Meshup is a protocol on top of IOTA to share accident warnings but could also be used to share other location based warnings in a decentralized and permissionless way.
In short: Putting homomorphic encrypted data on the tangle to preserve user privacy and comply with GDPR.
Mobility Context: Vehicles are becoming smarter. The more intelligent the vehicle, the more data it records and interprets. A large portion of this data is personal information. From driving routes to driving behaviours this data is the property of the user. In order to be GDPR compliant and maintain user privacy data must be handled in a manner that enables utility but preserves privacy.
The Solution: Homomorphic IOTA used homomorphic encryption, a unique way of encrypting data that still allows for operations to be made on it, to scramble personal data publish it on the IOTA Tangle. This encrypted data can be stored on the DLT and be operated on without breaching the privacy of the user. This enables for privacy to be preserved while allowing for a user to share and monetise their information.
In short: Augene addresses the so-called ‘range-anxiety’ felt by many drivers of electric vehicles.
Mobility context: Charge points are scarce -especially in rural areas- which is why many drivers of electric vehicles are afraid of getting stranded. A feeling much different from the freedom that was once associated with owning a car. In addition to this it’s probably safe to say that trust in car manufacturers is quite low at the moment — so why trust in the average range that car makers give you? There must be another way.
The solution: Augene addresses this by crowdsourcing -fetching information from many vehicles- a realistic picture of how far you can actually drive with your electric vehicle. Vehicles will put information on how far they were able to drive on the tangle. This platform is owned by no one and therefore every every thing can participate, regardless of brand, manufacturing or ownership.
In short: Securing an audit trail from a mobility drone for later analysis.
Mobility context: Vehicles are collecting more and more information. This information is being used to inform business logic and make payments. Ensuring the integrity of this data is paramount when dealing with flying vehicles that must adhere to strict regulations.
The solution: Throughout the course of a trip the vehicle will continuously publish data to the Tangle for realtime updates and analysis that can be later proven to be truthful.
The Blockchained Mobility Hackathon showed the power of collaboration between between industry players who would often be competing. Out of this event we saw a collection of innovative solutions to problems facing the mobility industry.
We look forward to supporting future events across various industry verticals. I hope to see you at the next one!