The White House plans to invest an extra $80 million into smart city projects, while Wanxiang has said it will use Blockchain to drive a $30 billion investment in smart city initiatives.
Chinese automotive giant, Wanxiang, has announced that it will use Blockchain technology to drive its smart city initiatives, according to reports in Coindesk.
During the Global Blockchain Summit, Wanxiang declared that it intends to invest $30 billion over the next seven years.
The money will be spent on 83 million square feet of land in Hangzhou. Wanxiang will use the land to build a new development designed to promote technology innovations.
Wanxiang already owns $500,000 of ether, the cryptocurrency behind Ethereum – a public Blockchain-based distributed computing platform – and the $50 million Blockchain venture fund, Fenbushi Capital.
According to Coindesk, Wanxiang is seeking to fund blockchain entrepreneurs working on efforts that may be aligned with its objectives as a means to support this investment.
Feng Xiao, vice chairman, Wanxiang told Coindesk: “We can’t tackle all the use cases that might arise from the smart city project. That’s why we’re opening it up to use cases from all over the world.”
“We want to use Blockchain to manage IoT (Internet of Things), and use it help devices to interact with each other. Smart appliances can be managed with Blockchain.”
A global smart city opportunity
This is not the only recent global investment in smart cities.
The White House recently announced that it will invest another $80 million into technology and smart city projects.
The majority of the funds ($60m) will be used by the National Science Foundation on investments and grants for smart city projects during 2016/17 fiscal years, reports ReadWrite.
The investment will include ‘high-risk’ projects, healthcare technology and data research.
At the same time, the White House has discussed plans to expand its MetroLab Network – a group of partnerships between universities, local governments and research institutions with focus on smart cities – to include new partnerships.
The White House has also said that it will put greater effort into assisting the cities that want to become smart cities.
To do this, the National Institute of Standards and Technology plans to develop a framework for IoT-enabled smart cities, and the
The announcements follows a new U.S. legislative push to increase funding for smart city initiatives, and the opening of a $160 million, multi-department initiative to fund smart cities research nationwide, as reported in Fortune.