World’s First IOTA Electric Charging Station Unveiled

ElaadNL has unveiled the world’s first electric charging station in which charging and paying can be done through IOTA’s Tangle technology. ElaadNL announced the charging station in a blog post, indicating that it’s part of its new test site located in the Arnhems Buiten business park in the Netherlands.

IOTA Was a Perfect Fit

In announcing the new station, ElaadNL described IOTA’s Tangle as being a perfect fit for the sector, stating that it could have a great impact on other sectors as well.

This technology might be a perfect fit in the future connected and fully digitalized world. The exploration of this technology in the e-mobility domain could also provide insight for other (connected) sectors like the energy sector.

IOTA’s Tangle is a distributed ledger protocol that is designed to cater to the very rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. It is open source and facilitates machine-to-machine interactions including feeless payments in real time and the secure transfer of data.

The post further detailed IOTA’s effectiveness, noting that it eliminates the need for an intermediary and makes the entire process autonomous.

No back office and no communication protocol is required to operate the charging station: the transactions are exchanged directly without the use of a charge card or subscription. The IOTA charging station operates completely autonomously and takes care of communication and payment with the end ‘user’. The meter values are stored every 15 minutes in the Tangle, which ensures reliable and irrefutable administration.

The charger sets up a TCP/IP connection with the car through pre-installed hardware, and the connection facilitates machine-to-machine payment and data exchange. The charger is available to the public, and those cars that lack the necessary hardware or software for the autonomous machine-to-machine transactions will be given the option to send IOTA tokens using the normal IOTA wallet.

The Backbone Of The Machine Economy

Speaking about the partnership, IOTA’s Head of Mobility, Alisa Maas, described the solution as showcasing IOTA’s potential to become the backbone of the machine economy.

This solution demystifies IOTA’s potential to become the backbone for the Machine Economy. Thanks to ElaadNL’s cutting edge innovation, seamless e-mobility is taking one big leap forward and we look forward to sharing this achievement with the rest of our growing ecosystem, at the crossroads of mobility, energy and smart cities sectors.

ElaadNL is a joint initiative of Dutch grid operators that researches the charging of electric cars in ways that are reliable and sustainable. Its managing director, Onoph Caron, expressed optimism that distributed ledger technology would become widespread in the future.

This charger shows the ability of using real machine to machine communications and micropayments, with the use of IOTA as a secure layer for these payments and data. ElaadNL researches all kinds of innovative and smart technologies with regard to charging electric cars. DLT-technology might become a widespread thing in the near future.

The announcement comes at a time when the cryptocurrency market is bouncing back from a long slump, and will add to IOTA’s momentum as it seeks to reclaim its record price.