Stop aggregating — start collaborating!
Tags: Mobility As A Service, Mobility, Blockchain, Blxm, Crypto

#DeMo — Decentralised Mobility for sustainable mobility

Decentralised technology is set to revolutionise how commerce is conducted. Blockchain (Distributed Ledger Technology) and Decentralised Identifiers (DID) are two suites of cryptographic protocols which open new horizons for the automation of transactions, transfer of value, and financial settlement.

Decentralised platforms free service providers from the stranglehold centralised hyperaggregators have on the markets they control. In decentralised platforms, stakeholders, i.e. node operators, jointly and collaboratively operate and govern infrastructure. Stakeholders interact through cryptographic, decentralised protocols to conduct commercial transactions.

The most obvious example for this is #DeFi — Decentralized Finance.

Who owns Aave? What controls Uniswap? Who regulates Curve?

The answer being: the free community of protocol writers!

#DeMo — Decentralised Mobility

Commercial decentralisation obviously requires the decentralisation of money. Otherwise how to incentivise, reward and pay for services that are provided and consumed purely in the cryptoverse of software-based blockchains?

Tokens which are natively embedded into the smart contract layer networks are the new medium of value.

How tokens and thus value is distributed is decided by consensus. All nodes agree on the distribution of value, unanimously, irrefutably and undisputably!

bloXmove’s mission is to apply these technologies, but even more so the mindset with which they are imbued and were created, to the democratisation and decentralisation of mobility; specifically to the delivery of mobility as a a service.

The building blocks of #DeMo

In essence mobility as a service can be reduced to the following user stories:

As a mobility provider I want to rent out my vehicles and be paid in real-time. As a mobility provider I sell my services in the form of access credentials, such that:

an access key provides the right to use a specified vehicle at a specified time for a specified service rate. Access control must ensure that the user presenting the token is the user the access token is made out to and is valid for the vehicle it is presented for. The access protocol must ensure security and be able to verify that all required credentials are verified. As a mobility provider I want to receive my payment the moment the service has been delivered. As a user I only want to pay for what I consume.

With bloXmove these functions are provided at the protocol layer. This enables providers and developers to develop seamless 1-click customer journeys for seamless urban mobility.

Decentralisation makes for optimal resource allocation

In the consumer world the “sharing economy” has been around for a while. What is the principle behind this and how can it be applied to B2B scenarios?

Take the following simple scenario:

Arthur owns 5 medium class and 1 premium class vehicles which he rents out for a living. Barbara owns 4 premium and 2 medium class vehicles she rents out for a living.

Both have a good reputation and happy customers. This results in peak demand for each of them to exceed the capacity of their fleet.

Peak is by definition above average demand. If they were to buy enough vehicles to cover the peak demand, the average demand would now be shared among more vehicles. This obviously results in lower utilization per vehicle which directly translates into less profitability or higher loss.

However, not having enough vehicles to cover peak demand results in:

→ Opportunity costs are incurred by lost business opportunities.

If, on the other hand they do increase their fleet, their RoI (return on investment will decrease, possibly even resulting in loss)

→ Excess supply capacity results in commercial inefficiency.

Sharing is caring — or how competitors learn to love collaboration

A decentralised protocol such as bloXmove creates a win-win situation in which

both Arthur and Barbara keep their customers and their customer relationship

Arthur and Barbara can each offer services exceeding their own supply capacity

most of all the overall utilisation of each of their combined vehicles increases — resulting in higher profitability for both!

Wallets are the touchpoints to decentralised commerce.

DIDs and Blockchain are critical in the creation of this new world of decentralised urban mobility. From the user’s perspective, the experience will look much like roaming while abroad. All you need to do is to log in with your credentials once with your primary mobility service provider.

This opens a whole world of possibilities and solutions. You not only get access to your primary provider’s infrastructure but that of all adjoining competitors and co-providers, making your journey intuitive and hassle-free.

DIDs and the related protocols are used to verify the identity of company, customer and car.

Digital Identities for Company, Customer and Car are the basic of decentralised commerce

Users interact with these protocols through wallets, which manage the secure keys and hold identities, credentials and tokens.

Cryptonetworks are the new commons

The International Cooperative Alliance defines a cooperative as:

“…an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.”

Over the past 20 years, cryptonetworks have evolved to be the new cooperative in the way they function. There is no discrimination as to who can participate in them and every member has the incentive to keep the network safe, neutral and self-sustaining. For bloXmove, the ultimate goal is not purely to redefine urban mobility but to tie this paradigm shift in mobility with the rapid change happening in the power industry with a huge focus on cutting emissions, hence our Power and Mobility moniker.

Using a common infrastructure across Power & Mobility opens the possibility for effective balancing of renewable power grids with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) tech.

Decentralisation as the preferred structure to connect Power & Mobility

For a sustainable and accountable future in this area, important economic zones of the world such as Europe must leave the path of centralisation. Neither regulatory governmental overreach nor hyper-aggregation by all-powerful corporations are sustainable nor effective in allocating resources and balancing the environment with commercial activity. We will only be successful by learning to share and cooperate through common protocols that optimise common interest rather than the balance sheet of a single entity to the detriment of others. Decentralised technologies open a path to that goal.

Our Position

The world has gone full circle and is now facing huge monopolies from software platforms the like of which can only be compared to Standard Oil in the early 20th century. Although regulatory authorities and governments are working to counter this with the means at their disposal, only an effective technological alternative can truly provide a balanced way out.

Blockchain and other decentralised technologies are a perfect fit for the task. With their focus on decentralisation and consensual incentivisation via tokenomics, they offer an attractive approach to combat and reverse monopolistic hyperaggregators or ever-centralising governments.

We are confident that decentralised technologies will continue to create more sustainable and more equitable cooperative industries, markets, and opportunities for Power & Mobility, as well as the wider world economy.