Blockchain Technology Could Facilitate Smart City Investments

According to a recent report by International Data Corporation, smart city investments are at an all-time high and hints that it could increase two-folds by year 2022. The promising figures are set to get better as the report suggests that it could reach $81 billion by the end of this year.

USA and China are leading the way when it comes to smart city investments.

Surveillance, public transport, and smart outdoor lighting will be receiving around a quarter of this year’s spend. The report also suggests that in the next 4 years, the focus on the investment will be inclined towards smaller, before unimagined uses.

The future and technological advancements in a smart city cannot be predicted accurately and this has caused a speculation to the IDC’s Worldwide Semi-annual Smart Cities Spending Guide.

Although not entirely accurate, the guide does provide an excitement and builds curiosity for the upcoming year. The potential for smart cities is overwhelming. One interesting and lucrative advancements is traffic management.

With the help of real-time sensors, traffic could be controlled across the city and optima calming measures can be used. Urban-road traffic is the ultimate modern-day chaos and it’s possible for small improvements to have dramatic effects.

Owing to the rapid increase in population in Shenzhen — China’s Silicon Valley, it’s an indicator that development comes at a cost.

Stats show that a car journey takes twice the time during Shenzhen rush hour and this has led to it being labelled as the #15 most congested cities in the world.

Where Do You Store a Smart City’s Data?

The home to around half the smart city projects worldwide, China faces issues in the form of big data.

Blockchain technology will be tremendously helpful and Shenzhen based- CyberVein is set to provide tech solutions to smart city, aiming to make this a reality.

Drifting away from traditional Blockchains, CyberVein is bettering Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) ledgers.

Where in, after each transaction, their system — as a node, will be required to verify the transaction of at least two other nodes.

How to store smart city data? By not storing it at all. A better and more effective alternative seems to be an offering by DAG — Decentralized databases.

Along with developing DAG architecture, Berlin-based IOTA is determined to ensure that these massive datasets are secure.

Thanks to this, the idea of a decentralized network and its ability to connect billions of devices is now validated. Its ability to be break down ledgers into pieces which eliminates the need to store the entire ledger on each and every node is one of the biggest advantages that DAG offers.

Expansion, along with storage of huge amounts of data that are to be collected by the petabyte, does not seems to be a hassle with DAG in a smart city.

The metro of Shenzhen, which boasts of about 3.4 million cars, is unlikely to face these issues owing to an enigmatic rich data bank every day.

For all you know, in the near future, you may be capable of strolling into downtown Shenzhen without a hint of an ever-increasing congestion!

On the top of blockchain powered smart cities is Shenzhen, a city that will acknowledge these setbacks sooner than the others. $158 billion is not a farfetched estimate, given that they have four years to reach that figure.

And CyberVein is not one to look back, and will work to the T for its actualization.

Blockchain Technology Could Facilitate Smart City Investments was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.