Toyota's IT department, a subsidiary of Toyota, is planning to pilot digital currencies to improve its payment services.

According to an official announcement on October 26th, Toyota Systems, the IT department of Toyota Motor Corporation, is collaborating with the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DeCurret to develop a digital currency system aimed at improving payment operations on DeCurret's blockchain platform.

Toyota Conducts Digital Currency Pilot

Toyota Systems stated in apress release that:

"Our goal is to become a leading global IT company providing comprehensive solutions. This is a technical pilot experiment to research solutions using blockchain and digital currency."

According to the announcement, the system will conduct a large-scale pilot among 2,500 employees within the company in a closed environment. Employees can use digital currency to exchange welfare points or gifts with the system's smart contracts. Toyota Systems emphasizes that the digital currency in the system is only for the pilot program's use, and employees cannot exchange the digital currency for Japanese Yen.

Due to the scalability issues with blockchain systems in a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, Toyota Systems' main purpose for conducting this experiment is to verify the system's business feasibility through a large number of experiment participants.

Automotive Industry and Blockchain Technology

Toyota has been actively exploring the feasibility of using blockchain technology to enhance its current business operations. Since September 2019, Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Financial Services Corporation established a cross-organizational virtual group called the "Toyota Blockchain Lab" to delve into the potential applications of blockchain in the automotive industry, such as supply chain, customer verification, vehicle authentication, and IoT. In apress release, Toyota stated:

"Blockchain is expected to become the foundational technology in the future network, allowing for more secure and open connections between users and enterprises under the premise of providing security and privacy."

In fact, besides Toyota, many other car manufacturers are also experimenting with blockchain technology. In early October, Korean BMW announced that it will be the first within the BMW Group to launch a blockchain-based token reward program, which is set to start in Korea by the end of this year. In September 2020, automaker Renault also announced a pilot experiment for its blockchain project "XCEED," aiming to simplify the compliance certification process for automotive components.