New Car Wallet Allows Automatic IOTA Payments

A German tech security firm has revealed a new vehicle-based wallet that will allow cars to automatically purchase fuel or charging services with MIOTA tokens.

Accessec demonstrated its new Car Wallet to the public last week. Integrated into the vehicle, the wallet interacts automatically with point-of-sale terminals. It can initialize services, such as authorizing a battery-point to begin charging, and pay the amount due directly to the merchant.

According to Sven Feuchtmüller, a research consultant at Accessec, drivers only need to ensure that the two hardware components are physically close enough to interact.

“In the car-and-charging-station example, one could simply drive towards the station and plug in the charger,” he wrote in an email to Crypto Briefing. “[A]uthorization and payments would be automatically done by your car in the background.”

The Car Wallet is based on the Tangle mainnet, and uses MIOTA tokens to transfer value to merchants. Dominik Schiener, co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, told Crypto Briefing that the foundation is “very excited” by the news and the benefits it could bring to the IOTA ecosystem.

“Companies like Accessec who are building actual products on top of IOTA help us to accelerate the adoption and importance of IOTA in industry and make it easier for companies across all industries to capture value out of the offering of IOTA,” he said.

Asked if any companies or vehicle manufacturers had expressed an interest in the technology, Accessec declined to comment.

What else is IOTA up to?

IOTA has focused on bridging the gaps between DLT and the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) sector. With many appliances automatically sending data to manufacturers and other devices, the Tangle is designed to facilitate fast, seamless and highly scalable machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and payments.

The Tangle is a DAG protocol, in which users verify prior transactions whenever they send payments. In theory, this makes the network inexpensive and highly scalable: an ideal protocol for the Internet of Things, where machines could potentially exchange thousands of micro-payments.

Data collected by the Tangle Explorer show that the network currently processes a little under five transactions per second (TPS).  That’s roughly the same throughput as the Bitcoin (BTC) network.

In January 2018, IOTA signed a partnership with the government of Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, to explore how the Tangle could be incorporated into the city’s new ‘smart city’ initiatives. Taipei’s authorities announced a new identification system, using the Tangle protocol, last June.

The Car Wallet isn’t IOTA’s first foray into the automobile sector. The project has been working closely with Volkswagen to integrate the Tangle into the carmaker’s new Connect feature, allowing drivers to check how many miles their cars have driven.

At the time, the feature was expected to launch sometime in Q1 of this year, as Crypto Briefing reported last June.

This isn’t the first time Accessec has worked with IOTA. The company performed an audit on the project’s Trinity Wallet in the months running up to the wallet’s beta launch in August of last year.

Although the new IOTA car wallet will first be used for vehicles, Accessec believes that the software has wide-ranging applications. It can be used in “literally any use case where some actor buys some service from some Point-of-Sale (or another actor),” wrote Feuchtmüller, “where proper authentication and security are paramount.”

The author is invested in digital assets, including BTC which is mentioned in this article.