The BLXM token — a utility token for Power & Mobility
Power & Mobility unLimited will be publishing a series of articles and litepapers to introduce bloXmove: a Mobility Blockchain Platform connecting the two sectors of Power & Mobility.
BLXM is the utility token we will launch for the underlying decentralised protocol.
Introducing Power & Mobility and bloXmove
Power & Mobility Ltd. is an Irish-German venture company founded by former employees of Daimler Mobility and Athlon.
At the core of our activities lies bloXmove.com, a Mobility Blockchain Platform (#MBP).
Our vision and purpose is to launch a decentralised protocol for mobility-as -a-service, urban mobility and vehicle-to-grid applications; #MaaS, #V2G.
This article is the first slice of what will eventually become the whitepaper for our public token protocol, which we will launch this summer.
In this series of publications and the resulting whitepaper we will describe the protocol and its underlying token: BLXM.
Our vision is to provide a shared, cooperative infrastructure allowing smart cities and mobility operators to deliver multi-modal Mobility as a Service.
Using decentralisation we offer a way to achieve critical mass through network effects typical to platform economics without relying on centralised aggregator platform operators. The companies actually delivering their services on the bloXmove platform will enjoy an important improvement in platform mechanisms. The main issue with centralised platforms is that they tend to seize control of customer and billing relationships from the supply-side operators to the owners of the platform. Once such platforms achieve critical mass they achieve rent-extracting dominance. Examples of platform operators taking more than 20% of revenue from providers, who are faced with the stark choice of “take it or leave it”, abound. This creates a very unhealthy accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of very few to the detriment of very many. There is a reason antitrust bodies worldwide have begun to work towards breaking this stranglehold.
In this first overview we will focus on our “Power meets Mobility” use case.
The purpose here is balancing of power grids by integrating electric vehicles — and with that their batteries — into the power grid. By this coupling, electric vehicles can be used to balance power grids relying on renewable energy to achieve end-to-end, net-zero carbon-neutral mobility.
bloXmove.com — the Mobility Blockchain Platform and its protocols
In building a Mobility Blockchain Platform token protocol we focus on
- digital contracting
- transaction orchestration and execution
- token protocol
bloXmove.com leverages decentralised technologies, such as Blockchain, DLT and decentralised identifiers and verification protocols (#DID) to provide a shared transaction network.
This network offers transaction-as-a-protocol: handling
- verification of identity and credentials,
- transaction orchestration and execution and
- last but not least liability booking and revenue distribution
among the operators sharing the platform.
We have designed the protocol for maximum ease of use and minimal friction. Leveraging the capabilities DID and the associated cryptographic verification protocols offer, we can ensure that each party needs only to undergo onboarding and identity checks once. This applies to users and companies but also to the devices within the network. Access to services is verified automatically and liabilities due can be calculated fully automatically and distributed in real time by the shared distributed ledger.
Use Case: Power meets Mobility
To achieve net-zero carbon neutrality we need power generated by renewable energies such as wind or sunshine. This brings with it one huge challenge:
Renewable energies can neither be switched on nor off!
And that makes balancing the power grid to the carrier frequency of 50Hertz an increasingly hard thing to achieve.
This results in high volatility to the point that we see more and more events where power grid operators end up getting “negative prices”¹. What this means is, that neighbouring countries are paid money to receive electric power which the citizens of the country of origin paid for with prime dollars.
In the one of the next issues of this series we will introduce the concept and product of “flexibility” in power grids and describe the foundational mechanisms by which DID and Blockchain technologies can be used to deliver flexibility to power grids.
In the resulting market scenario, mobility assets, i.e. electric vehicles, take an active part in balancing power grids. We will first describe the technical, protocol-layer mechanism. From there we will move towards describing the utility and token design of BLXM.
In the immediate next edition we will describe some of the basic mechanisms on which we base the bloXmove platform.
