IOTA
IOTA, Observer and Tanglehub sign partnership to power smart cities in Asia
- The IOTA Foundation signed a strategic partnership deal with Observer and Tanglehub to jointly apply for smart city projects in South Korea and South East Asia.
- Observer will use IOTA technology to further develop use cases with its partners, such as 7-Eleven.
The IOTA Foundation has revealed a new cooperation with the South Korean Observer Foundation. Together with its solution partner, Tanglehub, the partnership will enable them to apply for building smart city projects in South Korea, the Asian region, and Europe.
Observer signed the partnership with the aim of tapping overseas markets and bringing the Internet of Things (IoT)-based ecosystem to major Southeast Asian cities such as Ho Chi Minh City or countries like Singapore. Also, the European market is one of the main objectives for the Observer Foundation.
IOTA advances its use cases in Europe and Asia
To get a strong foothold in that region, the partners will integrate IoT devices with “advanced exchange and research technology” to plan joint business models. The South Korean Observer Foundation will use the IOTA network and infrastructure to make its way into Europe.
Similarly, IOTA’s technology will enable it to “improve the efficiency” of the applications it already has in South East Asia. Among these use cases is the international supermarket chain 7-Eleven which will install weather stations in South Korea and Vietnam. IOTA Director of Partnerships Holger Köther had the following to say about the cooperation with the Observer Foundation and Tanglehub:
Since the Observer Foundation has committed to collaborate with the IOTA Foundation on projects in South Korea, this commitment will also be reciprocated. Observer Foundation will be introduced to smart city projects in which IOTA plays an important role. With Tanglehub’s experience we have already started the first tests to integrate IOTA into the Observers’ environmental stations, securing the data directly at the source.
For his part, Observer Foundation CEO Tae IL Cho highlighted the wide range of uses he believes IOTA has. The IOTA protocol can cover multiple use cases in smart cities, Cho added:
(…) we want to support the design and implementation of a service-oriented ecosystem, discovering innovative services that can use distributed identification services (DID) such as objects, data and contracts, as well as new services that link and use DLT/blockchain services (identity verification, logistics, payment, etc.) built through the Blockchain Free Regulatory Zone project.
Tanglehub uses IOTA’s distributed ledger technology to ensure data security and privacy. Through its “future-oriented” solutions, organizations can use the internet of things on a controllable and secure platform, as Tanglehub CEO Dennis Schouten explained:
We have been actively developing with IOTA since its inception and are convinced of its potential to provide a secure and scalable global infrastructure for data, micro-payments, digital twins and many other use cases (…) We are excited to work with the IOTA Foundation and the Observer Foundation on smart city projects.
The Observer Foundation, on the other hand, is recognized for having created a data information trading platform. There, any user can use the information collected with any device for trading and earn rewards with the OBSR token. The Observer Foundation has weather stations deployed in the smart cities of Jeju, Siheung, and others across Asia.
