Wanxiang announces plans to use Blockchain to underpin it's $30 Billion Smarter Cities program

By Matthew Griffin Connected Society 26th September 2016

WHYTHIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Blockchains momentum keeps rolling on with another company announcing another major push.

Another company jumped on the blockchain bandwagon in a big way, with Wanxiang’s $30 billion smart city project. The Chinese electric car maker announced the mega-project at last weeks Global Blockchain Summit.

Wanxiang said that it will invest $30 billion into a project that will integrate blockchain technologies with smart city innovations and that the project will involve the purchase of 83 million square feet of land in Hangzhou, where Wanxiang is headquartered.

Industry pundits predict that blockchain technology could be the ideal technology to underpin the Internet of Everything (IoE) because of blockchain’s ability to verify an individual device’s every transaction, communication and change – this type of verification will become crucially important in smart cities where increasing numbers of connected devices will begin spouting data from all corners of the urban environment.

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“We want to use blockchain to manage and monitor IoE devices, and to use it help devices to interact with each other seamlessly, automatically and securely,” said Feng Xiao, vice chairman of Wanxiang.

“Smart appliances can be managed with blockchain.”

this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen an announcement about similarly grand blockchain projects aimed at helping run smarter cities better and more efficiently – earlier this year the government of Dubai announced its in house innovation department will also be integrating blockchain into its smarter cities strategy.

Just how Wanxiang will integrate blockchain with smart city projects is still being worked through but company representatives are in talks with Microsoft and IBM on future collaboration and the project is expected to begin with innovations at the intersection of cars, smart cities and blockchain.

Wanxiang has already shown that it’s keen on blockchain technology with its launch of its $50 million Wanxiang Blockchain Labs.

“We can’t tackle all the use cases that might arise from the smart city project,” said Feng, “that’s why we’re opening it up to use cases from all over the world.”

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

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