BMW-Backed Blockchain Competition Offers Token Prizes for Auto Tech

The Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative has launched a development "Tournament" to explore how vehicles will communicate, co-operate and transact in the smart cities of the near-future.

The prizes come in the form of blockchain tokens, which will drive next-generation mobility and data sharing: Ocean Protocol, a blockchain enabled data exchange protocol, has committed $1 million worth of token prize; and Beyond Protocol, a machine-to-machine economy distributed ledger technology company has committed the equivalent of $250,000.

Regarding the competition, Ballinger said it's less like a hackathon and more like a cross between the DARPA Grand Challenge - where robotic vehicles competed to autonomously navigate through the Mojave Desert - and an XPRIZE. In fact, it's just the first phase of a 3-year project to assemble and test out the building blocks of next-generation mobility networks, he said, including components like non-GPS location communication between vehicles and infrastructure, micro-payments, and ad-hoc mobile networks.

Like the first DARPA challenge in 2004, Ballinger acknowledged this is only the first step.

Ballinger believes micropayments will certainly equip vehicles to do this type of thing, but much more as well; operating as an incentive to share data can reduce traffic flows across the board and also make driving safer, he said.

"The vision here is cars connecting with infrastructure and other vehicles in local ad hoc networks, sharing data, making a small payment," said Ballinger.

Jonathan Manzi, CEO of Beyond Protocol, said his team has been doing work that involves self-driving electric vehicles which could charge one another using wallets built into the battery units, as these become more efficient and advanced.

"Today, when a car runs out of gas it goes to the gas station. In autonomous tomorrow, a car could go to a charging station and then wirelessly charge another car," said Manzi.

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