summary

Mobility use cases combine blockchain, autonomous cars, and IoT. There’s a nonprofit consortium known as MOBI (Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative) aiming to make mobility services efficient, green, affordable, safe, and free of congestion. Fun fact, MOBI was co-founded by a Blockchain at Berkeley alumnus, Ashley Lannquist, doing a lot of exploration of the industry. One of their major use cases revolves around collecting a car’s data, the obvious stuff like miles driven, MPG, but also more micro datapoints like the force applied to the accelerator, for the purpose of informing safe driving cars. Drivers will be automatically compensated for their data using token micropayments. This concept is also being explored by Toyota and Jaguar/Land Rover. As far as other use cases, there’s supply chain and provenance, so tracking car parts, or an immutable ‘Carfax’-style used car database. That’s being done by a company known as CarVertical. There’s also automatic machine-machine payments, for electric vehicles and incentivizing autonomous vehicle decision making, like to decide when a car gets to merge. And then there’s car sharing, like a decentralized Uber or Lyft, or a further decentralized Turo, which is basically Airbnb for cars. Some 25% of payments to either of these services go straight to the companies, not the people actually providing the cars. Next we’re going to look at blockchain applications within the finance industry. You’ll find that these use cases revolve primarily around tokenization, disintermediated value transfer, privacy, and traceability.