Project Watch: bloXmove — Mobilizing Urban Transportation
Organizing transportation can be complicated. These days there are so many different ways to get around a city. Travellers can choose between buses, trains, taxis, and more recently, share cars,electric scooters and this makes it difficult to find the best route based on your timescale and budget, especially in an unfamiliar city.
bloXmove Mobility Blockchain Platform is a decentralized business-to-business infrastructure that will unify the different facets of transportation. All mobility service providers from micro-mobility to public transport to rental fleets to corporate mobility managers will be accessible through this one platform. bloXmove will also manage capabilities such as ePayment and ID verification for transport providers that require it. This allows customers to book a fully integrated journey across a city using multiple transportation modes all with a single click and with one ticket. The entire chain of transactions is managed by blockchain using state-of-the-art Distributed Ledger Technology. bloXmove Mobility Alliance allows a scooter provider, for example, the ability to make a train service’s routes available to its customers and to provide a complete urban mobility experience.
Today Paid Network sat down with Harry Behrens, Co-Founder and CTO of bloXmove and Sophia Roediger, Co-Founder and CEO of bloXmove to talk about the exciting things that bloXmove can bring to the transportation sector.
- Firstly, can you please tell us about how bloXmove will function from the point of view of the user?
bloXmove provides a shared software infrastructure in the backend that expands the option of the user (ie. the mobility service company) to offer fully integrated journeys and tickets to their consumers. The mobility provider, such as a scooter fleet operator, can increase efficiency through process automation, less customer acquisition, and less onboarding fees. It will also speed up their integration with new mobility partners. Furthermore, by utilizing the transport asset provided by other verified ecosystem partners, they can access new markets and customer groups that they would never reach with their own app offering.
bloXmove also benefits the person on the street though. Right now, each and every mobility service company or city has its own app for booking, paying and accessing mobility offerings. Through bloXmove’s distributed ledger technology combined with decentralized identifiers (DID) this fragmented landscape can be connected.
Instead of using one app to access a taxi and then another app to rent a scooter, for example, logging into a bloXmove-powered mobility provider makes it possible for the consumer to access not just the services of that selected provider but the services of other mobility providers that the user needs beyond that of the primary app they logged into.
bloXmove is not an app per se. It is the decentralized ecosystem providing the backend that allows different mobility providers to collaborate with one another. This gives the user a more integrated and hassle-free experience when they use urban mobility and makes it a more convenient alternative to car ownership.
2. So bloXmove is accessible by customers through transport providers?
bloXmove works through mobility service providers. The Mobility Blockchain Platform works in the background and is not itself a user-facing product but it is generating clear consumer benefits in their everyday life as described above. In the future, the consumer will have a personal wallet and digital identity to check-in into the urban mobility alliance that provides all their transportation needs. All of this can be powered by bloXmove.
3. What edge do you think blockchain technology adds to an industry like transportation, and what do you think are possible roadblocks to success in this industry and how will bloXmove work to overcome these?
Blockchain gives us the ability to bring different parties that typically don’t work together under one roof. It cultivates trust in an environment of competitors. Furthermore, the distributed ledger technology realizes efficiency for the onboarding of a high number of different mobility providers (globally more than 2,000). Through the combination with decentralized identifiers (DID) we can generate a highly secure and verified interlink between consumers, companies and vehicles.
bloXmove’s mobility blockchain platform has three major advantages. Firstly, we provide decentralized identification of users meaning just one login on any mobility provider unlocks the services of all the others. Secondly, we provide secured transactions for identification, verification, contracting and payment in one platform-as-a-service. This reduces complexity and costs for the mobility providers that usually deal with different parties for those transactions. Finally, we settle transactions in real-time to give providers the freedom to plan quickly and expand where needed.
The main roadblock that faces blockchain in the transportation industry is low crypto adoption in mainstream society. A lot of people have little or no understanding of how blockchain works and often have a less than favorable view of the technology. This misconception needs to be overcome alongside the tendency of some jurisdictions to place restricting regulations on blockchain projects without fully understanding the technology itself.
The challenge is to get the critical mass of providers onboarded very quickly. The variety of providers start with very innovative, digitally advanced mobility services like scooters, car sharing and ends with very regulated, traditional public transportation providers like train and bus companies in cities — we have to overcome the blockchain scepsis in all of these parties and convince them of the benefits our service provides. Network and industry know how is the key.
bloXmove is tackling these and other challenges by making blockchain transition for users as painless as possible. BLXM protocol is designed to attend to the needs of crypto natives as well as newcomers into the space via a hybrid environment with regulated B2B customers managing their funds in fiat.
4. How can transport providers around the world integrate bloXmove? Have any notable partnerships been secured?
bloXmove has a number of key capability partners which include a leading decentralized ID solutions provider and a blockchain-positive banking institution. The mechanism is quite simple. Through the protocol-as-a-service and simple SDKs, the providers can plug in. It only needs API, a product owner, and a tech architect. bloXmove is providing the rest and is facilitating the technical onboarding as well as the contract definition for the operating model that will link the ecosystem partners.
We have a thorough process that helps us choose capable customers that can deliver the bloXmove vision. If any project or team wants to adopt our collaboration over aggregation philosophy and suite of products they can reach us on +353 1 5266700 and via all our social media channels. In parallel we work on a kind of tutorial because the vision is that in future any provider can organize their onboarding process in a few minutes only by watching a short explainer video. It is that simple.
bloXmove is proud of the first 9 letters of intent we have received from big European companies like Flixbus, TIER and 50Hertz.
5. What cities will bloXmove be rolling out first?
bloXmove will initially be in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and then the surrounding countries of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Next year we will start a very comprehensive analysis of the Asian market and plan the expansion there in Year 3.
6. What utility will the $BLXM token have?
$BLXM is the token that powers the bloXmove ecosystem and unlocks and pays for the services of all mobility providers. It is also the mechanism through which all B2B settlements are made. $BLXM can be staked on liquidity farms as well as serve as the governance token. The transaction fees from the ecosystem will be managed with token burns so last but not least, it is an investment in the future of decentralized mobility.
With that we have enabled the BLXM Token Foundry (the foundation). The foundation holds 54% of total tokens, so this will be used in the future to support the community, the tech and initiatives bringing carbon-neutral mobility forward.
For fully decentralized mobility (#DeMo), BLXM will be the only valid token until min supply has been reached. I.e. users need to procure BLXM to pay the providers for mobility services. bloXmove in turn receives BLXM from the providers for transaction fees. It is from these transaction fees that we burn the above mentioned 10–40%
7. Tell us a little more about the token burns.
BLXM is not only THE utility token for decentralized mobility. It is the only utility token by which both services as well as transactions can be paid on bloXmove. The community of early adopters and backers of our vision are going to be the first holders of this token.
BLXM will be the only layer-2 token in use for decentralized mobility until we reach the threshold of 10 million units in circulation. By that time the platform should be self-sustainable. At that point there will be one fifth of the amount of tokens in circulation with a platform that has greatly increased in revenue, market and traction. This should provide the holders of these tokens with the well-deserved reward for supporting us in the early phase and believing in us until that time.
8. Daimler, the multinational automotive corporation, has supplied its blockchain license to you. How exactly will this partnership work?
bloXmove is a result of a complete management buyout from Daimler. As such, it is a completely independent entity. See the press release here where both parties spoke about the strategic move. bloXmove owns the software code and the rights for the product development.
However, the bloXmove team maintains a healthy relationship with the great experts at Daimler to this day and both parties have ongoing talks and collaboration around further pilot ideas with Athlon — the fleet management company of Daimler.
9. Bloxmove will be launching its IDO on Ignition. What was attractive about the Ignition launchpad and how has the process working with the PAID team been so far?
PAID ignition is one of the partners and players in the crypto scene from the very beginning of all those markets’ development. bloXmove was convinced by the expertise, the community, as well as the radicalness and cleverness of how to deal with adaptations and new strategies in a highly volatile crypto market. From day one, the team brought us together with great experts, marketing specialists and seed investors. The partnership got closer through a crash in the crypto market where we had to take joint decisions of postponing an IDO date — yes or no. Therefore we worked together over the last months not only weeks and this will move on with intense advisorship.
10. What strategic advantages has bloXmove received from teaming up with Master Ventures and PAID Network?
Especially in the phase of shaping the tokenomics and the allocation phases from private sale, investor pre sale, marketing allocation — here we needed and got the best advice and master ventures invested their time to give explicit advice based on deep data analytics which they did before. Furthermore, the analytics and know-how for token marketing was priceless for the bloXmove team which has many marketing experiences from a corporate environment but never did a token launch before.
11. What added value do you believe bloXmove will provide the PAID ecosystem and community?
bloXmove is a special, hybrid project combining the traditional mobility space with the highly dynamic crypto space. We are not the next DeFi or NFT project in gaming etc. We bring blockchain technology to our everyday life, decentralizing and revolutionizing urban mobility. The team is very experienced, has market know-how and leadership skills. We are building a sustainable company of the future. bloXmove is addressing a real customer problem and has a validated product-market-fit.
Our CEO Sophia Rödiger, is one of the visible women in tech and mobility, while Dr. Harry Behrens has been a luminary in the industrial blockchain space for almost 5 years.
The people have trust and believe in our product, team and the strong vision of decentralized mobility. This high quality we bring into the PAID network and want to cultivate this long-term partnership
12. Thanks for your time. Finally, when can we expect to see a working product and what should our community look forward to in the coming months after your IDO on Ignition?
The platform is mature and we plan to onboard at least 3–5 partners before the end of this year for proofing the Minimum Viable Ecosystem. In Germany we will go live at the beginning of next year with real, paying business to business customers. There are a few more big partnership announcements planned for the next few months. Furthermore we push the partnerships with 50Hertz and the energy web foundation to bring the ‘energy meets mobility’ use case to the next level. This sector coupling of green energy and mobility will be the next futuristic step towards green, carbon neutral mobility which is one of the core values of bloXmove.
Thanks very much to Harry and Sophia for talking to them about how bloXmove can solve the issue of a fragmented mobility sector.
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