What blockchain can do for smart cities, and why interoperability is so important.
Best Crypto Smart City
Advanced technology has the potential to aid in the efficient management of urban development and population expansion.
Business model, platform, and infrastructure all need to be considered when it comes to interoperability.
Independent smart cities will not enough; transparency and coordination among numerous smart cities will be required.
Two of the key reasons why smart cities are garnering so much attention are the rise of societal concerns linked with increased urbanisation at the same time as the growing need to minimise public budgets. Between 2018 and 2030, the number of cities with populations of 10 million or more is predicted to rise from 33 to 43, according to the United Nations. While urbanisation is supposed to deliver significant economic strength owing to population and industrial concentration, it also comes with concerns, such as increasing congestion and environmental issues.
Smarter cities are becoming more popular, and the economic depression brought on by COVID-19 necessitates more efficient urban administration than than before. The smart city market, which includes the areas of energy, healthcare, and security, is predicted to increase at a 23 percent annualised rate between 2020 and 2024, totaling $2.1 trillion. Best Crypto Smart City
Advanced technology, such as blockchain, can help solve these societal problems and achieve effective urban management. Without the need for a single administrator, blockchain allows network participants to share data with a high degree of reliability and transparency.
For this data exchange, blockchain is likely to be used. Smart Dubai, for example, is researching blockchain use cases across a variety of areas, including finance, education, and transportation, as part of its ambition to make Dubai the happiest and smartest city on the planet. For example, a project is underway to use blockchain to simplify enrollment procedures for students transferring between emirates.It's crucial to note that having autonomous smart cities isn't enough for smart cities to contribute to societal challenges and to run efficiently while enhancing service quality. Rather, ensuring interoperability and coordination among multiple smart cities is critical. Efforts to achieve this goal are already underway. In March 2020, Japan's cabinet office produced a white paper on reference architecture for smart cities, citing interoperability as one of four key ideas in the promotion of smart cities.
What is the World Economic Forum doing to help cities become smarter?
The World Economic Forum serves as the secretariat for the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance, which brings together municipal, regional, and national governments, private-sector partners, and city residents around a common set of core guiding principles for the implementation of smart city technologies, such as openness and interoperability.
A recently published framework for interoperability, which proposes a three-layer paradigm for blockchain usage, can help smart cities.
1. The governance, data standards, legal frameworks, and commercial models layers are all part of the business model layer.
2. Consensus methods, smart contracts, authentication, and permission are all part of the platform layer.
3. Hybrid cloud, managed blockchain, and proprietary components make up the infrastructure layer. It's worth noting that attaining interoperability necessitates more than just fixing a technological problem; it also necessitates resolving issues of governance, data ownership, and commercial revenue models that encourage ecosystem stakeholders to collaborate.
Consider one of the anticipated smart city services: mobility as a service (MaaS). MaaS combines numerous transportation networks in a seamless manner to deliver extremely convenient mobility services. There is an initiative to leverage blockchain for data interchange and income sharing across numerous transportation companies in order to realise MaaS, and transportation may occur across cities. At the business model layer, concerns of data standardisation – such as for people movement data and data collected from Internet of Things (Iota) devices – and commercial models, such as how to allocate income among transportation providers, must be addressed.
For transit tickets, a smart contract, which is a computer protocol that allows self-executing, credible, and transparent transactions, could be used at the platform layer. Interoperability difficulties for ticketing may need to be handled because different blockchain systems utilise different languages for smart contracts. Because permissioned blockchains (those with an access control layer that allows certain actions to be performed only by specific identifiable participants) are commonly used for data exchange across multiple transportation systems, the presence of proprietary components may pose a challenge in achieving interoperability at the infrastructure layer. Best Crypto Smart City