Taipei City has partnered with the IOTA Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation, in order to drive the efforts towards reaching smart city goals.

IOTA is the inventor of Tangle, which it describes as a “blockless distributed ledger which is scalable, lightweight and for the first time ever makes it possible to transfer value without any fees.”

Under the partnership, IOTA and Taipei City will explore the possibilities of adapting IOTA’s technology to meet the smart city needs through a number of projects, aimed at improving data integrity and authenticity concerns in public services and other domains. The first project will be digital citizen cards with built-in TangleID.

IOTA said that its secure distributed ledger technology (DLT) could help make Taipei City’s digital citizen cards tamper-resistant, relieving citizens from the worries about identity theft or fraud when voting, providing background medical record information, or using any government-related service. In addition to digital-ID, they would also explore other areas including healthcare, and inter-organization and inter-city data exchanges.

“IOTA is one of the innovative players in the cryptocurrency world because of its unique technology,” said Wei-bin Lee, Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology in Taipei City Government. “With Taipei City always thinking ahead and with IOTA’s technology, this partnership is a strategic move to usher in the era of smart cities to the citizens of Taipei. We welcome the IOTA Foundation to Taipei City and are excited to embark on the future together.”

According to the official release, a project is already underway that aims to create palm-sized air sensors that detect temperature, humidity, light, and pollution. Called “Airbox”, the project is a joint effort by Edimax, Realtek, Asus, and Academia Sinica, LASS, and Taipei City. It has been installed in citizen homes as well as in 150 Taipei City elementary schools and is collecting and sharing air quality data online.

In cooperation with DLT-focused startup BiiLabs, the Airbox data will be put on the Tangle, in order to integrate incentivized payment in IOTA. This will enable a real-time air pollution monitoring with IOTA’s technology utilized by all the PM2.5 stations in Taiwan, IOTA explained.

“We are so excited about teaming up with Taipei City,” said David Sønstebø, Co-Founder of the IOTA Foundation. “It proves that our next-generation technology is ready for real-world use cases and is more than just a theory. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the effect IOTA can have on making the world of IoT ever-more connected and paving the way for not just smart cities, but a smart world.”