NFTicketing for Mobility
How we use NFT-based ticketing to decentralize mobility in Nigeria
Drivers need to disintermediate from aggregators
This is the 3rd in a series of article on #NFTicket. Previous articles are here:
Personal mobility continues to move away from personal car ownership to Mobility as a Service.
This has triggered the rapid market growth of companies such as UBER, BOLT or Grab which dominate ride-hailing in their respective regions.
These giants burn 100s of millions of USD in VC-money to build a brand and sales juggernaut which they then use to steamroll whole economic regions in record time.
This allows them to aggregate customer demand and customer relationships. The result being their total domination in the markets they have thus steamrolled.
They have now reached the sweet spot: a rent-extracting monopoly or duopoly. Which they promptly use (abuse?), to becoming THE gatekeeper, THE intermediary between supply and demand. Anybody who wants to work in that sector: pay The Man — and pay him well!
Very much to the detriment of the individual drivers who are actually doing the work and delivering the service.
Once the aggregator achieves critical mass, they really start turning the screws in their role as the gated bridge between supply and demand.
And throughout all of this they continously acquire a monopoly on the high-end of the value chain: customer data and billing relationships.
Drivers get to sweat in traffic jams; find them themselves in total dependency of this predatory commission regime.
The aggregators have rapidly decreasing operating cost — essentially cloud services and software development — but get 20% or more of revenue (!!) and the trend is rising.
Seriously? 20% of revenue? Oh, and to sweeten the deal for the service provider they generously (not) allow him to keep 100% of the operating cost (fuel, car leasing or rental, insurance etc.).
Sweet deal — for the aggregator. And the drivers get the short end of the stick…
bloXmove.NG uses NFTicket for disintermediation
“Start collaborating — stop aggregating”
We believe that the best way to move this industry to a more sustainable and most of all equitable and fair balance, is to take the power to dominate away from the likes of UBER and BOLT and put it into the hands and wallets of the actual stakeholders: customers, drivers and service providers.
This is what blockchain, web3 and other decentralized technologies are built for and what they do exceedingly well and in a highly scalable way.
NFTicket is such a web3 protocol.
It specifically provides transaction management, billing and settlement using open protocols which are publicly accessible and most of all neutral.
“Neutral” meaning: NFTicket processes data and billing on behalf of the ecosystem stakeholders —
but NFTicket never owns the data nor the business relationships.
Self-sovereign decentralization at its best.
It can be deployed Ethereum-compatible blockchains such as CELO or Binance Smart Chain.
The 5 core mechanisms of NFTicket
The protocol is specifically designed to handle business transactions for:
- Vouchers
- Coupons
- Membership and Collections
- Tickets
4.1 check-in only: i.e. events, such as concerts, where all access control and billing can be done on entering or starting the event or service.
4.1 check-in/check-out: this is the mechanism for any and all services being delivered in the form of a controlled rental, e.g. mobility services, electric charging, AirBNB and of course for bloXmove.NG - Certificates of ownership, such as renewable energy certificates, carbon offsets or any other real-world asset.
NFTicket provides full support all aspects of the transaction management in delivering mobility services:
- Issuing mobility tickets,
- Topping up tickets; including “debit-card” style storage of ERC20 tokens in each ticket,
- Access control and verification of credentials,
- Check-in confirmation and committing of transactions,
- Composing billing data,
- Check-out and seamless, real-time settlement in ERC20.
All of this fully is decentralized and composable.
bloXmove is to Mobility what DeFi is to finance.
NFTicket is the first #DeMo (Decentralized Mobility) protocol and we are launching it in the most vibrant market we can think of: Nigeria!
The core protocol
The protocol is built around a number of smart contracts the bloXmove team has been developing over the last year.
It can be best understood by focusing on the core aspects of the ‘NFTicket for mobility’ reference implementation:
- Issuing: selling and minting of tickets,
- Check-in: and access control. Start of service or rental,
- Check-out: Billing, settlement and closing of transaction chain.
Selling, issuing and minting an NFTicket
NFTickets can be sold and issued, i.e. minted, by the party delivering the service or a registered reseller — identified by a wallet or smart contract.
The core Ticket data structure is routed according to a highly-customizable serviceDescriptor which identifies
- Service Operators that are qualified to deliver the service,
- Resellers that are allowed to resell the service,
- Price per Credit in any of the registered ERC20 tokens we support,
- Remaining number of credits,
- Remaining balance in each of the ERC20s supported.
NFTicket Check-in
A check-in works exactly the same way as when you enter a bus or a gate-controlled subway:
- The operator (NFTicket) verifies the credentials included in your ticket.
- If all business logic satisfied, it might lock a certain number of credits.
- It also locks the NFTicket in its vault.
- Then the NFTreasury distributes any check-in fees and locks reserved funds.
NFTicket Checkout
Check-out is the magic moment when everything is settled, the money — i.e. ERC20 tokens — is distributed, the NFTicket is debited and then returned to the user.
The NFTreasury manages all balances and accounts for
- User — unused but paid funds on the ticket belong to the user and can be refunded at any time
- Service provider: at check-out the service provider is credited with the amount of ERC20 tokens corresponding to the price of the service delivered.
- Reseller
- the NFTicket protocol itself, which receives a small fee (between 1% — and 4%)
NFTicket soon to be shared as open source
We will be sharing the full code base of NFTicket in the near future, in fact some of the development versions are already accessible on bscscan and polygonscan as we speak.
While we foresee and hope that NFTicket will become a pure-play web3 protocol, we also understand the need to provide the service to that part of the world, which hasn’t seen the light yet, i.e. are not using blockchain or web3 in their IT infrastructure.
NFTicket for business will therefore also be released in the form of APIs and webhooks. This NFTicket API-as-a-service will package the protocol in a format following design patterns set by standard payment or event management APIs.
By providing this middleware between web2 and web3, we can ensure seamless and smooth integration into legacy, web2 software, relieving customers of the need to deal with the complexity of chaincode or web3 technology.
