How Greyp’s Digitalized Equity Offering Paves the Way for Mobility Innovation
Greyp is embarking on a groundbreaking digitalized equity offering that will allow our users and supporters to own a piece of the company as we build out a mobility platform for a future that is connected and sustainable. As a high-tech mobility company, we are designing the platform to facilitate the emergence of innovative use cases, many of which we expect to be developed by third parties on top of Greyp’s infrastructure.
Along with our sister company Rimac Automobili, we are led by Founder Mate Rimac and backed by top companies including Porsche and T-Mobile. We started life as an e-bike company, and are proud to have just won another top bike award. But we are ready to power beyond bikes and have already started making progress toward our vision of the smart mobility future. Greyp has partnered with Slock.it, which connects physical devices to the blockchain, to integrate their Incubed client into our G6 smart e-bike. This allows the bike to securely read and write information directly to a fully decentralized blockchain, opening the door for the development and improvement of numerous use cases. While blockchain is just one of the elements of the Greyp “stack,” it gives the platform technical capabilities that exceed most connected device platforms.
In this post, we provide a taste of some of the applications that the first-of-its-kind equity investment opportunity is intended to support.
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Value Transfer
Artificial Intelligence, in the form of autonomous vehicles, will play an increasing role in the future of mobility. The potential gains in safety, efficiency, sustainability, and accessibility offered by driverless cars are driving virtually every major mobility and technology company to invest heavily in R&D to bring this future closer.
One of the biggest challenges to the rise of autonomous vehicles is payment for services. Autonomous vehicles must be able to pay for tolls, congestion fees, fuel or charging, and other essentials without an owner present at the wheel. At Greyp, we are working to tackle this problem with blockchain technology. Specifically, we envision a network where every vehicle or other machine has an integrated digital “wallet.” This, combined with the ability to sign and verify blockchain transactions, will enable autonomous machines to receive and create payments, both to humans and to other machines. In this way the connected machines that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) can begin to form an Economy of Things (EoT).
In fact, the Greyp team has already developed a proof-of-concept application in cooperation with the Energy Web Foundation (EWF). We successfully connected a G6 e-bike to one of EWF’s charging stations, and executed transactions between the bike and the charger whereby the bike effectively “paid” for its own charging. The charger itself was also blockchain-enabled; upon receiving payment from the bike, its smart contract started the charging process. This basic example illustrates the possibilities of enabling M2M payments for autonomous vehicles in the near future.
Vehicle access management
Another important use case that we expect to grow out of our connected mobility platform is smart vehicle access. Using blockchain technology, we can ensure that a person entering and/or attempting to operate a vehicle is authorized to do so. This is important in the case of individuals protecting their own vehicles from theft or misuse. And the use case will become even more important as the world moves from an ownership to a participation model, in which people buy into services that offer cars on demand, with many different people potentially using the same vehicle (as with bikeshare and rideshare programs today).
As with M2M payments, Greyp has already demonstrated a proof of concept for this use case. We presented an application enabling users to rent the G6 e-bike using the cryptocurrency Ether at Event Horizon this year. The user and the bike would execute a smart contract whereby the bike granted access to riders automatically upon completion of payment. This simple exchange between human and machine opens the possibilities of easy and secure vehicle access across the global economy.
Just the Beginning
These are just two of the use cases that are likely to arise on the Greyp connected mobility platform. Others include unique vehicle identification, vehicle history registry, incentive-based insurance mechanisms, and fractional ownership. Our digitalized equity offering, which enables our users to own a piece of Greyp and the connected future, is the perfect way to build these innovations.
Stay tuned to this blog and to our social media channels for more information about Greyp and our digitalized equity offering.
Also, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in our Telegram channel!
