Bosch, the biggest automotive company in the known universe, is running trials on the Ethereum blockchain, Decrypt reported.
A Bosch spokesperson confirmed to Decrypt that the multibillion-dollar engineering giant has been running prototypes using Ethereum, the world’s second biggest blockchain.
That makes it the biggest competitor to IOTA, which the giant has been working with since 2017, and Hyperledger, one of Bosch’s partners within MOBI—the mobility open blockchain initiative it’s been beavering away at.
The multinational would not reveal how exactly it intends to use Ethereum and its handy smart contract tech. But a quick appraisal of Bosch’s latest use-cases and friendly declarations about open source tech enables us to hazard a guess.
At its annual conference, BCW2019, in Berlin last week, Bosch announced a trial of electric-car charging ports, which will communicate and transact autonomously with a vehicle. It’s a use-case for Ethereum that has been demonstrated in the past.
In fact, Germany’s RWE electricity supplier has, since 2016, shown that the platform can reliably minister to charging stations across the country—all are running on the Ethereum public blockchain.
And according to Bosch’s website, “the Ethereum platform allows such projects, including for example, in the case of Bosch applications, autonomously charging and paying EV.”
However, a spokesperson told Decrypt that, currently, “there is no strategic favor for any existing technology. We have evaluated Ethereum, Hyperledger and IOTA in small prototypes before.”
Bosch has long been a proponent for the Internet of Things (IoT), and, since it struck up a solid relationship with IOTA, it’s not new to distributed-ledger-technology (DLT).
IOTA is not a blockchain per se. Like Ethereum it uses DLT but it claims to go beyond blockchain. The so-called IOTA Tangle aims to resolve the scalability challenges of existing blockchains and enable the transfer of value without transaction fees. The suggestion is that this model is better suited for the emerging machine-to-machine or IoT economy.
However, IOTA—which can be described as a rival to Ethereum—was hardly referenced at BCW2019, say observers.
Despite this, the relationship is alive and well, although IOTA doesn’t appear to have any tech trials with Bosch in the pipeline. Instead Bosch has an ongoing interest in the Berlin-based startup through an investment in IOTA tokens made by Bosch’s venture capital arm, RBVC. “RBVC is driving forward the development of new IoT business models,” said the spokesperson.
Source: Decrypt