University of Nevada – located in the Western United States – has announced its new partnership for the development of a blockchain autonomous vehicle research project.

This collaboration is between the University of Nevada, blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) startup Filament and Nevada Center of Applied Research (NCAR) with the attempt to develop the new standards for blockchain-powered autonomous vehicle.

As the press stated, the “smart city” work is promoted as a “cutting-edge vehicle-to-infrastructure communication innovation” due to the autonomous connected cars that backed by blockchain tech. The initiative aims at providing a safer driving and better communication between self-driving cars and surrounding infrastructure.

The director of the Nevada Center for Applied Research – Carlos Cardillo has described that the increasing connected vehicles as well as numerous IoT devices could form unwanted situation because of vulnerabilities. He then explained that using blockchain could prevent these vulnerabilities and expand the data integrity standards.

The “new city” project is reportedly launched in trial soon with the integration of  Filament’s Blocklet® technology – a system to connect the vehicles to the distributed ledger. The University will also include a trustworthy record of events about the integration through blockchain transactions.

In order to prevent the project from man-in-the-middle attacks, Filament CEO Allison Clift-Jennings revealed that the vehicles only allow Blocklet-attested data transmissions. “With the data recorded on a blockchain, the shared root of trust is established for transparent exchange and transactions.” She further noted.

As The Crypto Sight reported recently, South Korea’s biggest car manufacturer- Hyundai Motor Group, has announced the integration for blockchain tech into pairing their electric vehicles (EVs) with smartphones.