The IOTA Foundation, a German nonprofit blockchain entity, is working with renowned automaker Audi’s Berlin-based think tank, Audi Denkwerkstatt. The news was announced by IOTA’s Head of Mobility and Automotive Alisa Maas. The two will be exploring the application of Tangle’s use cases and partnering to work on a Google Design Sprint for one week.
Mobility Prototype Designs
Audi and IOTA will work to create low-level prototype designs to gather feedback from customers. The automaker’s think tank has seven Audi employees who connect the team to 15 colleagues from a diverse range of business areas, age groups, and levels. They can help in “generating, validating, and implementing ideas about premium mobility within six months. The aim is to establish business models independently or in cooperation with others.”
Audi’s step in finding better mobility solutions is innovative because it defines the future of the industry. The automaker visualizes mobility in cars, as well as infrastructure changes and even pedestrian mobility. The think tank is designed to approach this idea by the efforts of all Audi employees collaborating in a coworking space in Berlin, called “Factory.” The company intends to work with several other businesses, technology partners, etc. to help get the first mover advantage in the premium mobility sector in the future.
Can Tangle Be Used to Untangle the Mobility Problem?
In the blog post, Maas highlights that working with Audi is a great opportunity for the Foundation. She writes that IOTA’s open source protocol is “predestined to be an innovation accelerator for any kind of business ideas that rely on trust in data, scalable & safe machine to machine communication & transaction settlement.”
The Foundation is the developer of Tangle, an innovative distributed ledger system that is designed for the Internet of Things. It facilitates machine-to-machine interactions and helps in securing data transfer over immutable ledgers in a fee-less, real-time micropayment ecosystem.
The native cryptocurrency of the network, MIOTA, is currently the ninth largest in the world, priced at $0.99 with a market capitalization of over $2.7 billion, per CoinMarketCap data. Unlike some other currencies, the maximum supply of the crypto-coin matches the current circulating supply.