Bringing Blockchain Closer to the Everyday User
For advocates of decentralization, the sharing economy is utopia made real — peers transact directly with peers, avoiding governmental or corporate intermediaries. It has proven a boon to regular income earners, allowing them to profit from under-utilized assets like extra apartment space, or from skills like home repair.
Without traditional intermediaries and regulators, though, every player in the sharing economy needs to first build trust.
Trust issues in the sharing economy
Not even the unicorns of the sharing economy — Uber and Airbnb — have escaped controversies that threatened trust in their users, the platforms, and the products (rides and rentals).
But such problems don’t show that the sharing economy doesn’t work. Instead, they’re growing pains faced by a rapidly expanding sector. Research by PwC predicts that five sectors alone of the sharing economy — peer-to-peer accommodation, car sharing, peer-to-peer finance, music, TV and video streaming, and online staffing — could attain global revenues of US$335 billion by 2025.
The urgent goal, then, is to find a way to fix trust issues in the sharing economy.
A new way to build trust
This is where GSENetwork comes in. GSENetwork is a decentralized trust network for sharing economies to solve trust issues that has burdened the growth and unleash the potential of the sharing economy. It maps each user’s digital footprint, analyzes behaviour, to create a trust score. What sets it apart is that it is built to use users’ online and offline behaviour to determine their trust value in the sharing economies.
To create a reliable trust score, GSENetwork uses IoT, customizable smart contracts, and blockchain-based incentivization, by redistributing the externalities created by the ecosystem back to the ecosystem contributors.
A new way to define trust
The Ride & Earn campaign is the pioneering example of GSENetwork’s concept in action. A partnership between GSELab — the Singaporean company that designed GSENetwork — and dockless bike-sharing platform ofo, the campaign incentivizes ofo users to ride bikes responsibly by offering GSE tokens.
In this campaign, IoT is used to monitor rider behaviour, such as trip distances and the use of authorised parking areas and preferred parking zones.
Contracts are enforced through the platform — users scan a QR code through the app or encode the bike’s plate number to receive a passcode to unlock the bike. When they end their trip, the platform automatically receives the payment via the rider’s pre-selected payment method.
When riders meet certain conditions — like distance travelled, responsible bike use, and parking — they automatically earn GSE tokens. These tokens are the form of incentivization in the Ride & Earn campaign, especially given that they have a finite supply, with only 10 billion available.
With an incentive system like the one offered by Ride & Earn, sharing economy players can help encourage positive behaviour and thus build greater trust in the platforms, as well as their users and products or services.
Integrating Green-Mining into the real world — Ride & Earn
For a campaign like Ride & Earn, mining tokens — GSE tokens — also becomes a widely-accessible initiative that is an effortless way of integrating blockchain adoption in to daily lives.
Compared to these initiatives, Ride & Earn offers a lower barrier of entry in that ofo users simply need to continue doing what they’ve been doing all along — riding bikes via the platform.
Ride & Earn was launched in Singapore in February 2018 and we have received tremendous encouragement from the local community. Since then, we also made our way to Japan at the start of July to reward ofo users in Japan.
Next up, we will be bringing the Ride & Earn campaign to South Korea, so our fellow South Korean ofo riders, hang on! We will be announcing the launch date soon.
