Munich to Trial Blockchain-Based Smart City Commute

Taking its name from the transit area that encompasses Munich’s city limits, the project aims to minimize the city’s car-intensive commuting culture by incentivizing drivers to reduce the number of car trips they make into the city.

Blockchain to the Rescue?

Datarella’s multipronged approach, which incorporates blockchain-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, is supported by the city council and aims to incentivize the use of public transport, which will save commuters time, money, and stress.

Thank you for your good auestions in today‘s Q&A session with @Fetch_ai CEO @HMsheikh4 – we will present first results of M-ZONE soon! https://t.co/AtMTLgb7GD

— Datarella (@Datarella) November 12, 2020

The project will pay (in FET tokens) individuals who normally park at the Connex buildings, where the trial is located, to park elsewhere:

“Each registered user who is a regular car park user will be rewarded with a certain amount of tokens per minute for not parking at the parking lot. As soon as a car or its related wallet address is registered as parked by the Carpark AEA, the token airdrops to this wallet stop/slow.”

Fittingly, the Connex buildings are located on the northern edge of Munich, just West of the city’s famed English Gardens, which are colloquially referred to as Munich’s green lungs. In addition to optimizing the traffic flow around Munich, the project also aims to lower the city’s CO2 emissions. On its part, the Munich city council itself has set a goal of reducing its CO2 emissions by 50% (compared to its 1990 level) by 2030.

Munich’s High Cost of Living

According to the Munich press, around 390 000 individuals from districts outside of Munich commute to work in the city, which is home to only 1.5 million. Due to its fast-rising cost of living in recent years, Munich has seen an exodus of people leaving the city limits for cheaper rents and more space. This has led to the popular German city having some of the longest commute times in the world and unsustainably high CO2 levels. Some drivers even drive up to an hour each way, despite the rapid train connections, which in many cases take half the time. CEO of Datarella, Michael Reuter, says that even a 10% reduction in car usage would reduce annual CO2 emissions by 34 000 tonnes.

Fetch’s FET token

Fetch’s FET token, an ERC-20 token, was one of the first to be launched on Binance’s Launchpad. Initially selling at around $0.085, the token raised an astounding $6 million in under 30 seconds. Binance listed the token on March 1, 2019, when the price exploded 450% to about $0.40. The token is currently trading around $0.05, where it has been since late September of this year.