Jaguar Land Rover To Reward Drivers With Cryptocurrency For Sharing Data

Jaguar Land Rover is testing a software that will eventually allow drivers of its future cars to earn IOTA cryptocurrency in exchange for sharing data.

The IOTA coin is currently trading on digital asset exchanges at US$0.27. IOTA, much like Bitcoin, enables people and machines to transfer money and data without any transaction fees, which the IOTA Foundation (the creator of IOTA) refers to as "permissionless transactions."

The Jaguar smart wallet will reward Jaguar car drivers with IOTA tokens for actions such as enabling their vehicles to automatically report useful data (such as traffic congestion or potholes) to navigation providers or local authorities.

Jaguar said drivers will also earn rewards if the car takes part in a ride-sharing program. The overall goal of Jaguar is to "achieve zero emissions, zero accidents, and zero congestion."

The car manufacturer said it's testing the technology at the new Jaguar Land Rover software engineering base in Shannon, Ireland. Its engineers have already equipped some Jaguar F-PACE and Range Rover Velar with the smart wallet features. It's not revealed when the feature will be rolled out commercially.

"The smart wallet technology...can be easily adapted into all new vehicles," said Dominik Schiener, IOTA Foundation co-founder and co-chairman of its board.

"IOTA wants to enable interoperability with all these different players. So there is no Jaguar coin, no BMW coin, but one universal token for this machine economy."

The IOTA Foundation claims IOTA solves the inefficiencies of blockchain technologies. IOTA is based on a revolutionary distributed ledger technology called "the Tangle." The foundation says the Tangle is the missing link for the IoT and Web 3.0.

"Powering a secure, scalable and feeless transaction settlement layer, IOTA will empower machines and humans to participate in flourishing new permissionless economies -- the most important one being the Machine Economy, which we are building," said the Foundation.

This article originally appeared in IBTimes US.