Toyota Explores Polkadot To Increase Business Efficiency
Polkadot-based Astar Network recently announced the first web3 and blockchain hackathon sponsored by the Japanese Toyota Motor Corporation. HAKUHODO KEY3 company, co-founded by Astar and HAKUHODO, one of Japan’s biggest advertising companies, will host the web3 hackathon on February 25th of this year.
The Astar Foundation will sponsor the event with $75,000 and the web3 foundation with $25,000. According to a press release, the $100,000 will be used as a reward for winning designs chosen by Toyota, Astar Foundation, web3 Foundation, Alchemy, and HAKUHODO KEY3.
How Toyota Can Improve Operations Using the Polkadot Network
Sota Watanabe, CEO of Stake Technologies, made the announcement. Watanabe stated that in recent years companies have been facing the challenge of increasing the workload of managers due to increased business decision making and management of team members. Therefore, the Astar Foundation and the Polkadot-based Astar Network decided to develop a DAO support tool for enterprises.
DAO is the abbreviation of “Decentralized Autonomous Organization”. By setting rules through smart contracts on the blockchain, organizations and corporations like Toyota can be managed and operated in a “transparent” way.
Furthermore, Watanabe said that based on Astar Network’s convictions, if the company can manage projects like DAO, organizations like Toyota, where team members can operate autonomously and with distributed decision-making, can reduce the burden of the manager’s work and, at the same time, help in the impact of the team members in the company’s growth.
Toyota, the world’s largest automobile company in terms of cars sold, has more than 330,000 employees worldwide. At the hackathon, Astar is looking for DAO tools to implement at the automaker to improve its workflow and operations.
Watanabe said he is looking at potential products, not just for Toyota, but also to scale to third parties. Sotanabe said:
(…) Needless to say, Toyota is Japan’s largest company and one of the world’s leading international companies. We are very excited to be hosting the web3 Hackathon at Astar with Toyota. During the event, we intend to develop the first PoC DAO tool for Toyota employees. If a good tool is produced, Toyota employees will interact with products on the Astar Network on a daily basis. At some point in the future, I think we will see blockchain integrations in cars. Today, we are still in the exploratory phase, but very excited about the many possibilities.
This is Toyota’s first web3 hackathon and aims to support its vision to improve its operations; this hackathon will be the first step in the process.
Overview of the use of Blockchain by the Astar network
Astar aims to become the top blockchain project in Japan. So they established a company called Startale Labs. Astar says it is committed to further promoting web3 in the Asian country.
Government companies in Japan and web3 solutions are working with Astar to bring together a global platform to accelerate and build blockchain-based solutions for various use cases. The Astar ecosystem has become Polkadot’s flagship Parachain globally.
Astar offers the flexibility for all Ethereum and WebAssembly tools, a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine (WASM) for developers to start building their decentralized applications (dApps). Astar offers an Incubation Center for teams of all backgrounds and focuses, used to accelerate the growth of Polkadot and its experimental blockchain, the Kusama Network.