One small step for IOTA, one giant leap for cryptocurrency.

Real world adoption has remained an elusive goal for many cryptocurrencies, and IOT solutions in particular are widely seen as future tech rather than present day platforms. IOTA has crossed a significant benchmark, with an IOTA electric vehicle charging station going live in the Netherlands.

The system was independently developed and built by Dutch smart charging provider ElaadNL.

"We see the potential of DLTs, and we thought: 'Could we integrate this into a charge station? Can we use this technology to create a better integrated system, as with smart grids, and get as much renewables into the system as possible?'" wrote Elaad developer Harm Van Der Brink.

"Electric vehicle charging is one of the many applications where IOTA as the base-protocol for the transactional settlement between machines is the obvious choice. The work done by the team at Enexis in creating the first ever IOTA-based EV charging station has been tremendous, and will pave the way for more adoption of IOTA in the mobility space," said IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener.

"As cars are evolving into computers with wheels, and the era of electrical vehicles is ushered in, it is imperative that we have the infrastructure to support this new era of mobility. Enexis’ ElaadNL project paves the way for this by utilizing the IOTA protocol, this is exactly what we have in mind for the new 'Machine Economy'," agreed IOTA other-co-founder David Sønstebø.

The system they designed included a wallet system, and communications between the charging station and its customer.

It's still a preliminary design, and in the future, Elaad plans to add more secure machine-to-machine messaging, off-channel payment systems – kind of like the lightning network – which are essentially a secure, open tunnel for offline payments between systems, which can then be uploaded to the IOTA Tangle at a later date. This would allow systems to operate even without an Internet connection.

It also plans to develop a machine wallet for cars, to let the vehicle itself hold IOTA for use rather than requiring the user to be an IOTA holder. This would allow anyone to essentially pre-fund their electric car for a certain amount of electric charging in the future.

Disclosure: At the time of writing the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VEN, XLM, BTC, NANO

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