Japanese automotive giant Toyota is considering using the Ethereum blockchain in the design of a vehicle mobility-oriented account (MOA). The project proposes to create digital blockchain accounts for cars, potentially enabling fully autonomous driving in the future.
Unveiled last week as part of Toyota’s Mobility 3.0 concept, the project focuses on exploring mobility as a smart account on the blockchain. Bringing vehicle mobility onto public blockchains brings tokenization rights, making the car function as a completely independent service entity.
“The most extreme scenario suggested by these features is fully autonomous driving in the future,” reads the Toyota blog post. He added that autonomous mobility no longer requires human action, as all laws are regulated in a chain-based world.
Every Toyota car has its own Ethereum account
Toyota is exploring how to design an MOA based on Ethereum’s ERC-4337 account abstraction standard. Interestingly, the auto giant noted that such an MOA design on ERC-4337 guarantees that the Blockchain account for the car will be preserved, even if the private key is lost.
“The account attraction separates the authentication process from key management, ensuring that the account itself is preserved even if the private key is lost,” Toyota wrote. “This enables more secure and flexible account management.”
What’s more, the use of Ethereum will also make it possible to manage information about the car , such as usage history, in a more transparent and efficient way. In addition, ERC-4337 enables “deterministic address setting before account deployment.” This helps connect existing vehicle identification systems to addresses on the chain.
Toyota has also proposed the concept of a key token that follows the NFT standard and stores information about the car owner and “usage rights.” “By expressing car access as an NFT linked to the MOA, rights can be controlled simply by transferring the NFT,” it noted.
“This makes it possible to digitally handle ‘usage rights’ without knowing the hardware, making it easier for developers to implement services such as car sharing.”
Toyota’s Blockchain Lab has proposed a mobility-oriented project based on accounts for vehicles. The lab is a virtual organization established in 2019 within the Toyota Group to promote the use of blockchain.
