Toyota Considers Ethereum for Car Digital Accounts

Toyota, a Japanese automotive behemoth, is contemplating the utilization of the Ethereum blockchain to develop a Mobility-Oriented Account (MOA) for its vehicles.

The design suggests the establishment of digital accounts for cars on the blockchain, which has the potential to facilitate the implementation of entirely autonomous driving in the future.

The project, recently unveiled as part of Toyota’s Mobility 3.0 concept, is dedicated to investigating mobility as a smart account on the blockchain.

We are introducing vehicle mobility onto public blockchains, resulting in the tokenization of rights, enabling a car to function as a fully autonomous service entity.

Toyota’s blog post stated that the most extreme scenario suggested by these features is the implementation of fully autonomous driving in the future. It was further noted that autonomous mobility no longer necessitates human operation, as all rights are managed in the on-chain world.

Every Toyota Car Has An Account on Ethereum

Toyota is investigating the development of MOAs that adhere to the Account Abstraction Standard ERC-4337 on Ethereum.

Intriguingly, the auto behemoth observed that an MOA design on ERC-4337 ensures the retention of a car’s blockchain account, even during a private critical loss.

Toyota wrote, “Account Abstraction ensures that the account is retained even if the private key is lost by separating the authentication process from key management.” “This facilitates a more flexible and secure account management process.”

Additionally, the utilization of Ethereum will facilitate the more transparent and efficient management of car information, including usage history.

Additionally, ERC-4337 permits the “deterministic establishment of an address before the deployment of the account.” This facilitates the connection between on-chain addresses and the current vehicle ID systems.

Toyota also proposed the key token concept, which complies with the NFT standard and stores vehicle owner information and “usage rights.”

“Permissions can be easily managed by transferring NFTs,” it observed, expressing car access as NFTs linked to MOA.

“This enables developers to more easily implement services like car sharing by enabling the digital management of ‘usage rights’ without concern for hardware.”

Toyota’s Blockchain Lab has proposed a mobility-oriented, account-based initiative for vehicles. In 2019, the Toyota Group established the lab as a virtual organization to foster the adoption of blockchain technology.