We were busy, weren’t we?
As we head into 2024, it is time for us to look back at what 2023 has brought us and to look at the road ahead. We are proud of our achievements last year at bloXmove and will take you on a trip down memory lane to show what 2023 has brought us.
1) Launch of NFTicket: core protocol for access management and settlement
At the start of 2023, we finished development and launched our NFTicket protocol. You, the community, could participate in the beta launch by testing our NFTicket solution. We had over 10.000(!) participants (wallet addresses) actively testing the NFTicket beta.
After our NFTicket beta launch, we integrated NFTicket with a Blockchain-enabled electric scooter. This was within a joint project with the University of Mittweida (M4All Mobility). NFTicket is also at the core of “Decentralized UBER”, which we launched in Nigeria (more below) as well as a pilot with NRverse, offering renewable energy certificates to provide carbon-free power to event organizers. A video explaining the RECs as an NFTicket by bloXmove, is found here. A full breakdown of all you can do with our NFTicket solution can be seen here.
2) Back to the #DePIN roots: partnership with peaq
While our current development focusses on applying NFTicket to the “Decentralized UBER app” we are launching in Nigeria — that is not where our roots are.
When we started working on what was then called the “Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform”, we were clear where the future of mobility lies:
The #FutureOfMobility lies in autonomous vehicles, acting as self-sovereign economic agents. A core element of this is identity and control of a wallet (tied to that identity).
Which is precisely what #DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastrcuture) tries to achieve for pretty much any industry and any physical asset able to generate revenue.
This brought us into a cooperation with peaq — a layer-1 blockchain with a strong focus on the real-world asset tokenization, #DePIN (Decentralised Physical Infrastructure) and the Economy of Things.
We can proudly say that we launched our Decentralized mobility dApp on the Peaq dApp store, which can be found here, as part of Peaq Control. The peaq partnership announcement and its objectives can be found here.
We are looking forward to continuing to collaborate with Peaq and its growing ecosystem.
3. bloXmove pilot in Nigeria (bloXmoveNG)
In March 2023 we launched the beta release of bloXmoveNG dApp, allowing our community to get early access to see and test what we built. In the first round of testing, community members tested our dApp and provided feedback which allowed us to finalise and polish our solution.
Their feedback helped form our dApp, thank you testers!
In its first release, the app relied on an external wallet (https://valoraapp.com/) to interact with our smart contracts.
A major learning was that this greatly reduces user acceptance, so we built our own wallet and integrated it into our passenger and driver apps. This removed the need for an external app to be used when making payments.
We also partnered with MetrocabsNG in Jos, with their drivers to use our platform for ride hailing. In June, it was finally time to launch with MetrocabsNG and our (pilot) dApp was live for the first time, a significant achievement! In August we started working with ambassadors and fully launched our Flagship solution in Jos and Lagos.
In order to have real-world experience and test the market feedback, we ran a 3-month pilot in Jos and Lagos from July-September.
The results were positive:
- Listing of our bloXmoveNG app on both the Google Play store & Apple’s App store
- 500 verified drivers onboarded in Jos & Lagos, Nigeria & over 800 applicants
- Over 2.000 passengers onboarded & 1.500 driver app downloads in the app store
- Over 750 rides taken with within the pilot period
A full breakdown of our achievements in Nigeria during the July-September period can be found here.
Besides the app itself, we also greatly improved the website for bloXmoveNG (see https://bloxmove.ng/).
4) bloXmove DAO and launch of governance NFTavatar
In our original BLXM Whitepaper, published in October 2021, we already said we would eventually move to a fully decentralized mobility solution (DAO or semi-DAO). Last year, we released a full breakdown of what this entails. The breakdown, including the reasons why we move to a (semi-)DAO system, is found here.
We initially planned for the decentralisation to take effect in Q3 and Q4 of 2023, but after setting up an initial plan and careful consideration found it best to work with an external party, a DAO expert in order to realise our plans. This DAO expert is FactoryDAO, one of the leaders in DAO building with vast experience in DAO tooling and management.
Together with FactoryDAO, we laid out our plans and set up the structure of the DAO, which is being implemented as we speak. More on the progress and next steps is to come via our weekly updates and was shared via our AMA session with FactoryDAO on Thursday the 11th of January. The recording of this session can be found here: Semi-DAO AMA with FactoryDAO.
As part of the (semi-)DAO system, we work with NFT Avatars for DAO governance. In Q3 2023, we had a Whitelist opportunity for interested DAO participants. The NFT Avatar will be mintable for free if you stake or provide liquidity in BLXM tokens. The whitelist application was a success and we received over 140 applicants! More on the Avatar and its use within the DAO system can be found here. In the next few weeks, information on the mint will follow.
5) Open-Sourcing: apps are out there!
We also made steps in open-sourcing our technology, as part of the (semi-)DAO transition. In the last quarter of 2023, we open-sourced both our passenger dApp as well as our driver dApp. These can be viewed here:
- Driver dApp: https://github.com/bloXmove/bloXmove.driver.git
- Passenger dApp: https://github.com/bloXmove/bloXmove.passenger.git
This year, we will open-source more modules to fully live up to our promise of offering decentralized mobility to all!
Once we open-sourced our full tech stack, tech contributions are enabled and granted via special programs which form part of our DAO system.