Access control, smart bikes, utilities and other elements of smart cities could soon be managed via blockchain technology, thanks to a partnership between telecoms giant Orange and Estonian company SmartKey.

The first use case for the partnership will be an extension of Smartkey’s Rescue without Barriers pilot, which saw rescue services in Olsztyn, Poland, use Smartkey to gain immediate access to every secure district and building in the area, using blockchain, cutting down response times and saving lives.

Hospital barriers and other gates and entrances open when a rescue vehicle using the SmartKey technology approaches. This is an example of possible applications of the access control function based on blockchain and connectivity within the licensed operator band and paves the way for Orange to be the first global operator to use blockchain to enable smart city applications.

This will be rolled out in more than 80 cities in Poland which, in cooperation with Orange, have implemented IoT applications integrated with the Live Objects IoT platform. The Live Objects platform is already being used to manage various city services, such as remote reading of water meters or street lighting control.

Thanks to the integration, it is possible to register devices with an Orange SIM card in the blockchain network and generate and distribute smart NFT access keys in the publicly available SmartKey blockchain network. By using Smartkey technology as a universal standard, this can also be applied to any Orange IoT device worldwide.

The specificity of blockchain technology – based on the so-called decentralised applications dApps – and Orange network security standards prevent unauthorised use of the virtual key. On the other hand, the flexibility of the SmartKey technology means it can be used in various urban and commercial services, for example in parking lots, in transport and public transport, loading and refuelling vehicles, monitoring, and in so-called distributed energy.

“Smart devices are not a new idea,” said Sebastian Grabowski, director of IoT at Orange. “Already over two million M2M cards from Orange work, among others, in such devices throughout Poland. However, even a wide range of such devices does not create a network in itself, just as a collection of houses does not create a city. We also need an infrastructure that connects IoT technology with the end user, and this is what blockchain provides.”

Szymon Fiedorowicz, CEO of SmartKey, added: “To enable blockchain of things devices to operate within the smart city of the future, we created a universal communication standard to connect devices over short distances. This cooperation with Orange, the leader of urban IoT services in Poland, will help our solution become a connective tissue for smart cities and cement our role in the smart city of the future and open up a world of new possibilities of using the internet of things.”