We’ve reached The Fourth Industrial Revolution, and along the way, it brought the concept of smart cities and homes. Who would have thought that one day we could integrate technologies in a way that it would perform most of our daily tasks? It’s not a utopia anymore but the whole system which allows optimizing technological performance to attain the best outcome for citizens and households. The intention of smart cities and houses has a common ground of carrying out efficient and sustainable operations. As urban areas are expanding, there is an obligation to provide all fundamental needs to people in a sustainable and clean way.

These concepts implement information and communication technologies, connected devices, and smart data storage. Leading technologies of this process are blockchain and internet of things (IoT). Blockchain is a digital distributed ledger technology that allows an effective and secure way of storing and sharing information. It creates digital blocks that contain encrypted data of every action performed on a ledger. IoT works as a connected network of devices. Generally speaking, it synchronizes various devices to share information. Blockchain and IoT are catalysts for smart cities and houses, and in this article, we will talk more about their role in this futuristic concept.

Why do We Need Smart Cities and Homes?

The amount of smart cities around the world is growing, but to understand this approach better, we need to dig deeper into the question of why do we need them. Autonomous cities and houses integrate technologies to make operations more efficient, eliminate unnecessary work for people, share information, and make it more personalized. The bigger goal of the idea is to build environmentally-friendly cities and households, reduce consumption and waste, improve a sustainable way of living.

Many governments notice these benefits and therefore try to transform their cities to be more environmental-friendly and automated. Numbers show that in 2015 spendings for smart cities were 14.85 billion USD, and in 2020 it’s predicted to reach 34.35 billion USD. As the market is quickly growing, more and more technologies are being incorporated to enhance this smart concept. Two most noteworthy are blockchain and IoT and to better understand their impact on the growth of smart living, we’ve highlighted relevant features.

Blockchain’s Role in Smart Cities and Houses Development

Blockchain companies are playing a significant role in smart cities and houses development. Technology’s features as immense amounts of storage, security and immutability levels serve the primary needs of autonomous areas. To be more specific, blockchain technology has plenty of use cases for smart households, but the focal ones are predicted to be:

Additional payments – cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain; thus it could open doors for broader payment options. The feature does not only include payments but also smart banking, managing your budget or administrating taxes.

Identity authorization – many big cities are suffering from threats of terrorism and crime. With the fake IDs market and identity thefts, it becomes harder to control this process. Blockchain could transform it by storing and verifying citizens’ identities on immutable and at the same time transparent ledger.

Governmental operations – cities that are known to have high rates of corruption could benefit from the more transparent system as blockchain. The system eliminates a middleman and protects information or any other exchange from being corrupted. It could include managing tax, the city’s budget, election, and many more.

IoT’s Role in Smart Cities and Houses Development

Internet of things world is expanding with the blink of an eye, and thereby it’s broadly implemented in the development of smart cities and houses. IoT plays a significant role to meet people’s needs and make devices more independent and user-oriented. Technology’s features allow connecting various devices and enabling data flow from one to another. Smart cities and IoT could work together to benefit from these specific cases:

Managing traffic – when a high number of people are moving to urban areas the issue of traffic congestion becomes more severe. IoT could solve this problem by sending a real-time traffic situation directly to your car or redirecting autonomous vehicles to a more convenient route.

Public security – many developing cities are already using this feature to protect their citizens. IoT integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) can detect and report real-time accidents to responsible institutions.

Sustainable energy – IoT could manage resources of a house or city and save energy by spotting unnecessary usage. Also, it could detect failures and notify owners thereby avoiding the expensive loss of resources.

The growth of urban areas results in the demand for smarter choices and viable energy. Many innovation leader countries are using digital solutions to transform their cities into more efficient working ecosystems. Smart cities and homes do not only improve public life but also make our daily tasks more comfortable and quicker. With the help of such innovative solutions as IoT and blockchain, we could make our cities and households more environmental-friendly, automated, and safe. Therefore, the concept could successfully develop further and enhance a broader range of niches.

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