Why do we need a new blockchain layer for cars at all?
Modern mobility is owned, operated, and insured by different parties, often in different places, yet the records that prove a vehicle’s identity, condition, and earnings live in separate systems. When capital providers cannot easily verify those facts, fleets get harder to finance and new services take longer to scale. Toyota Blockchain Lab’s new white paper proposes the Mobility Orchestration Network or MON, a protocol to make those proofs portable and machine verifiable so that value can circulate between regulators, banks, and operators without breaking local rules. Toyota sums up the intent simply: “MON is both a network and a protocol.”
The scale of the problem is not abstract. In the United States alone, outstanding auto loans are about 1.5 trillion dollars, which makes transparency around collateral a first-order issue for lenders. New car affordability has worsened, with average transaction prices hovering near recent peaks, and insurance costs rising at rates that outpace inflation, which squeezes both consumers and fleet operators.
Cross border complexity adds friction. There is no single global registry for vehicles. Even inside the European Union, registration certificates and procedures vary by country, and the global used vehicle trade suffers from inconsistent data, which makes due diligence slow and costly.
Against that backdrop, Toyota’s proposal is an attempt to standardize trust about vehicles so it can move where money and services need it.
What Toyota is actually proposing
On August 20, 2025, Toyota Blockchain Lab published “MON: Orchestrating Trust into Mobility Ecosystems,” a technical paper credited to Toyota Blockchain Lab with advisory from Ava Labs and TIS. It builds on last year’s Mobility Oriented Account or MOA, in which Toyota wrote, “Imagine a world where a car is almost equivalent to an account.” The new paper keeps that identity idea, but shifts the focus to the relations among manufacturers, owners, operators, drivers, insurers, and maintainers, and how to represent those relations as verifiable claims that other networks can consume.
Crucially, MON is presented as a protocol that local ecosystems can adopt, not a single global platform that tries to replace them. Local implementations interoperate via shared rules while keeping regional governance and compliance in place.
The core idea in plain English: bundle three kinds of proof
Toyota groups vehicle “trust” into three buckets and wants MON to bundle them into a format other networks can verify.
- Institutional proof Registration, title, tax, and insurance compliance establish that a vehicle legally exists and is allowed to operate. MON’s role is to take these off-chain attestations and expose them in a verifiable digital form.
- Technical proof Manufacturer data like VIN and type approval, software and firmware attestations, and verified maintenance confirm what the vehicle is and what has changed. MON records the sources so downstream users can check authenticity
- Economic proof Operational metrics and revenue history attest to how the asset is used and what value it generates. That is the basis for credit decisions and securitization.
If those proofs are machine verifiable, lenders can underwrite fleets faster, insurers can rate risk with less guesswork, and service providers can activate access rights without manual checks.
How the identity is modeled: two linked accounts for one vehicle
MON implements the identity as a Mobility Oriented Account and splits it for different needs:
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T-MOA on a Trust network keeps high integrity records for regulators and finance, like ownership, compliance status, and summarized performance.
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U-MOA on a Utility network handles live operations and access control for vehicles and people, summarizes high-frequency data on the edge, and sends only what the trust side needs.
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Under the hood, Toyota leans on established Ethereum standards to keep this composable: ERC-721 for ownership as an NFT, ERC-6551 for a token-bound account that lets the NFT hold logic and assets, ERC-4337 for smart-account features like session keys and sponsored gas, and ERC-7579 to make the account modular so new modules can be added over time.
Why it matters: a vehicle’s “wallet” can verify a driver’s right to use it, summarize operations, and post an attestation to the trust side without exposing personal data.
Turning relationships into finance: the Fungibility Ladder
Finance prefers fungible units. Mobility starts out non-fungible. MON proposes a path between those worlds:
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Ownership: the right to a specific vehicle is an NFT.
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Portfolio: many vehicle NFTs are bundled into a parent token with a clear hierarchy, so you can manage a fleet as one unit. This uses ERC-7401 for parent governed nesting.
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Security: a portfolio is valued and can back a fully fungible security token on a capital network, where transfer rules enforce compliance via standards like ERC-3643.
For a reader, the point is simple. If a municipality wants to finance 500 electric taxis, the lender is not parsing 500 different PDF folders. They see one portfolio with live claims about availability, health, and revenue, and a token that represents that exposure.
Why Avalanche shows up in the prototype
Toyota’s prototype uses Avalanche to stand up four purpose built L1 networks that talk to each other: MON for trust, a security token chain, a utility chain, and a payments chain. These can be public or private and can exchange messages using Avalanche Interchain Messaging with Teleporter and the Warp precompile. The choice reflects fast finality and native support for many L1s under one umbrella.
This is not a lock-in. Toyota lists alternatives like Chainlink CCIP and Cosmos IBC as viable interchain options depending on requirements. The idea is to pick a messaging layer whose security and operational model fits the integration.
Is there real demand for tokenized mobility assets?
Tokenization today is still small next to traditional markets, but it is real and growing. Estimates for tokenized assets vary widely, yet a conservative, observable marker is on-chain tokenized U.S. Treasuries, which have passed seven billion dollars across public chains. If treasuries can move on chain with compliance checks, fleet backed securities can plausibly follow once identity and claims are standardized.
Meanwhile electric vehicles are scaling fast. The International Energy Agency reports that EVs reached about 18 percent of global car sales in 2024, with sales rising from roughly 14 million in 2023 to an expected higher figure in 2024. That growth requires capital, and the more confidently investors can verify assets and revenues, the lower the cost of that capital.
Final Outlook
This proposal tackles a real integration problem rather than trying to mint a new coin. The MOA construct plus two-account mirror design separates fast operational checks from slow audit trails in a way that aligns with how fleets actually run and how investors actually diligence. The Fungibility Ladder is pragmatic. It does not pretend a single VIN will ever behave like cash. It shows the intermediate step where vehicles roll up into a portfolio with consistent reporting, then into a regulated security token that a bank can hold. The proof will be pilot data, not diagrams. The right early metric to watch is time to underwrite a fleet and yield spread versus comparable non tokenized deals in the same region.
If Toyota can demonstrate faster underwriting with lower defaults, and if regional authorities adopt a common set of attestation formats, MON would not need to be everywhere to be useful. It would just need to be the cheapest way to trust a vehicle at scale.
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