Iota has been formally invited by the European Commission to become part of a smart city initiative.
+CityxChange, a project that is aiming to develop eight European smart-cities has been selected to be a crucial part of the EU’s Horizon 2020 plan. The cities span the European Union, with Spain, Ireland, Norway, Estonia, Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria all participating. The project began with a vision of “co-creation of the future we want to live in”, and is working together to achieve this goal.
The Iota Foundation is one of a consortium of thirty partners enabling the +CityxChange project, and will be used to provide crucial economic infrastructure.
According to the Foundation’s blog a smart-city is defined as:
“smart positive energy cities, that use digital services to improve quality of life for and together with all of their citizens, generate more energy than they consume, and exchange experiences with cities across Europe to learn faster, together”
The project will be lead by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and receive twenty million euros from the European Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. Implementation is scheduled for 1 January 2019, and the Iota team are apparently highly enthusiastic to be involved. Iota Co-founder and Co-chairman David Sønstebø wrote:
“Being able to explore and demonstrate the utility of IOTA within the smart city context in numerous cities across Europe will be incredibly valuable going forward….As a Norwegian I am personally ecstatic about this project.”
This isn’t the first instance of a cryptocurrency being involved in a smart-city project, earlier this year VeChain announced it would be working with the Chinese government to create provide infrastructure for smart cities in the Gui’an New Area.
Perhaps these news stories should come as no surprise. Cryptocurrencies are a huge technological leap forwards for humanity, offering a huge range of efficiency and organizational solutions. The world’s future cities need a stable and reliable backbone of infrastructure, and the EU Commission seems to have found promise in Iota’s fee-less and allegedly infinitely scalable design.
