Industry consortium the Open Blockchain Mobility Initiative (MOBI) announced the start of the competition, whose goal will be to study the possibilities for communication and cooperation between vehicles and their implementation of transactions in the “smart cities of the near future”.

Initiative called MOBI Grand Challenge, which will last 4 months, starts tomorrow, October 12, while the public demonstration of the technology proposed by the winners, will be hosted by BMW Group and will be held in Munich in February.

Prizes include tokens that are considered as “key instruments of mobility and data exchange the next generation”: the developers of the blockchain Protocol to exchange data Ocean Protocol reserved for future prizes $1 million in tokens, and the team working with the technology for a distributed registry in the sphere of economy machine-to-machine (approx. technology that organizes the data exchange between vehicles, M2M) Beyond Protocol, allocated for this purpose, the tokens in the amount of $250 000.

It is worth noting, since its founding in may of this year MOBI continues to increase its membership, including start-UPS, automotive manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers (OEM), among which the most famous representatives of the industry. So, CEO and co-founder of MOBI Chris Ballinger (Chris Ballinger) said in an interview with Coindesk, which just signed an agreement with the new member of the consortium for R3.

As for the contest, according to Bellinger, he was less similar to the hackathon and is something of a cross between DARPA Grand Challenge, where robotic vehicles competed in independent travel in the Mojave desert, and projects premium XPRIZE Foundation to support breakthrough innovation in many areas.

CEO MOBI, said: in fact, this is just the first phase of a three-year project to collect and test the constituent elements of the networks of mobility new generation, in particular we are talking about features such as communication between vehicles without the use of GPS, infrastructure, micropayments and specialized mobile networks.

He stressed, as in the first DARPA competition in 2004, this is only the first step. The head of the consortium is waiting for donors, including corporations and government agencies, he is convinced the support will, as in the case of DARPA (approx. sponsor of the competition cars-robots became the U.S. government).

“We know that nobody is eager to participate in the project at first. The technology is still immature. But we think this will be possible within a few years,” said co-founder of the project.

Micropayments and electric vehicles

When micropayments and purses just appeared, began to arise the hypothesis about the possibility of the implementation of micropayments to identify the right fare, for example — to quickly get to the airport.

Bellinger sure, micropayments guarantee this, but also will entail a lot more changes in the area of effective communication, which implies the reduction of traffic flow and the organization of safer driving.

“The concept here is machines that connect to the infrastructure and other vehicles in the local specialized networking, communicating, making micropayments,” said Ballinger.

From his point of view, this may allow a car trying to agree on who should give in, to do it efficiently. In turn, a small speed adjustments can help to avoid accidents.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Beyond Protocol’s Jonathan Manzi (Manzi Jonathan) said that his team is working on unmanned vehicles, which can pay each other using wallets that are built into the battery — it seems like a more effective and advanced solution.

“Today when filling the car uses the gas, he goes to the gas station. In tomorrow’s Autonomous car will be able to go to the charging station and remotely charge the other car,” said Manzi.

Recall that in may the consortium MOBI, which includes BMW, Ford, Renault, General Motors and other companies, together representing 70% of the world automotive market, plans were announced for the development of common standards blockchain solutions in the field of communication.

Also, driving and turning of “smooth, secure and inexpensive process” in cooperation with MOBI promised IOTA Foundation.