BLXM — from venture to community-governed

bloXmove was incubated in Q1/2021 and launched the BLXM token Oct. 22nd of that same year.

From the outset — and until now — the founding team and key team members controlled the development of the software, the tokenomics and the project’s roadmap in a bootstrap mode we can call “Venture Building”.

But, we had always announced and planned that this initial bootstrapping must transition to a more decentralized “Community Control” continuation phase.

Quoting from the original BLXM Whitepaper published October 2021, we laid out the following Governance Roadmap:

Governing how the BLXM protocol is developed and how minted tokens are utilized will develop along the following phases:

1. A “foundation” — the BLXM Token Foundry Ltd — is governed by key stakeholders in bootstrap mode. In its initial growth phase the foundation operates in a mode similar to any other startup: fast decisions made by a small team in an iterative and agile fashion.
2. Active holders of BLXM tokens are given voting rights and are included into the decision-making process. Token holders can acquire voting rights by staking tokens. Voting rights will be weighted by amount and lock period.
   Governance (voting) rights will be issued, expressed and represented through two equivalent decentralized artifacts:
   – Verified Credentials (VC) issued by bloXmove. Governance VCs are not transferable.
   – NFTs, i.e. unique and identified tokens. Governance NFTs are transferable.
3. A web3-based governance DApp provides the interface by which proposals can be filed and voted on. The constitution of the foundation is amended to mandate that decisions made by the community are executed.
4. The last phase is a semi-autonomous distributed organization, a “semi-DAO”: its legal framework is still that of a Company Limited by Guarantees (CLG), foundation or equivalent. However, most of the governance is automated through Web3 applications in which qualified and registered “voters” govern the foundation in a community-based, decentralized way.

This roadmap was shaped by the founding team’s firm belief in the ethical and economical superiority of decentralized markets and ecosystems.

A rather less pleasant but more urgent element has now pushed us to bring this forward and transition from “Venture Building” to “Community Control” over the summer months of 2023.

This urgent element is the ongoing and increasingly strongly enforced view of powerful regulators that essentially any token, which is controlled, sold or traded by identifiable individuals or commercial entities may and shall be seen as an investment product and/or a financial security.

This urgent element has in turn opened up a somewhat unexpected opportunity: Coinbase — one of the world’s most stable and liquid Centralized Exchanges (CEX) — bases its eligibility criteria for tokens to be listed on their exchange on this rationale. Coinbase conducts proactive Business Development, in that they screen the market for tokens and then approach some of them to encourage them to fully decentralize as necessary requirement to be eligible for a listing.

This road to decentralization is the main scope of this paper.

The Vision: Decentralized, autonomous and composable mobility services

From our original BLXM Whitepaper, which we published in October 2021, I quote three of our five mission statements:

• Platform economics and network effects are key to scaling ecosystems. Shared, cooperative governance is the key to decentralization.
• Sovereignty over identity and data lies with the user.
  Open source protocols and standards are essential for a socially acceptable platform.
• Blockchain/DLT, Decentralized Identifiers and IoT are key technologies in building scalable, collaborative platforms.

What this means — plain and simple — is that we set out to develop and deploy a decentralized, autonomous and composable infrastructure to build and operate mobility and other rental services.

“Autonomous” meaning that:
this infrastructure can be used by anyone with a web3 wallet.

New businesses can be created and deployed on it — simply by writing 3rd-party service smart contracts — e.g. the “NigeriaService.sol” smart contract operated by Decentralized Mobility Ltd., registered in Lagos, Nigeria which operates a ride-hailing business under the brandname ‘bloXmoveNG’.

“Composable” means that:
smart contracts and web3 Apps (dApps) can be written and white-labelled, simply by integrating a wallet, and interacting either with a 3rd-party service contract or directly with the NFTicket.sol smart contract at the core of the protocol.

Because all of this is based on standardized and open protocols, apps and smart contracts built within this infrastructure, are interoperable with each other — which is how they become “composable”.

#DeFi (Decentralized Finance) showed us how this “composability” enables rapidly scaling, organic growth of new “composed” services, contracts and dApps.

We do the same for #DeMo: Decentralized Mobility!

Launch Phase: Achievements and next steps

bloXmove has concluded the first and major phase in its lifecycle as THE utility token for decentralized mobility.

We are proud to present the following 4 products as the output of this initial phase:

1. bloXmove mobility platform, on top of which
2. bloXmoveNG,the “Decentralized UBER” is running in Nigeria
3. bloXmove for #DePIN and the Economy of Things (EoT)
4. NFTicket, NFT-based access control and ticketing at the center of it all.

bloXmoveNG — Decentralized Mobility Ltd, Lagos, Nigeria

The technology has been launched into commercial operation by Decentralized Mobility Ltd., registered in Lagos, Nigeria as an e-hailing product under the brand name bloXmoveNG.
Both passenger and driver apps are available on Apple’s AppStore as well as Google’s PlayStore.

Moving forward, bloXmoveNG must now stand on its own feet as an independent commercial venture with a clear focus on business development and onboarding partners.

bloXmove for #DePIN and the Economy of Things

At the beginning of this year, bloXmove and peaq entered a partnership with the goal of bloXmove’s “Decentralized UBER” becoming part of peaq’s Polkadot parachain for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN).

In addition to the functionality already live for bloXmoveNG, the peaq deployment includes the ability to deploy and operate smart devices, such as e-steppers, charging stations or scooters.

Such devices — representing the ‘P’ in decentralized Physical Infrastructure — on a #DePIN blockchain act as independent, economic actors.
Economic actors provide their services, e.g. mobility, charging or rental using bloXmove’s NFTicket and peaq’s DID and consensus layer.
This represents the Economy of Things in action!

The work to integrate and launch bloXmove on peaq was commissioned to bloXlab through a grant by the peaq community. bloXlab is an independent commercial entity developing solutions based on bloXmove’s NFTicket core protocol. Testing for deployment has started at the beginning of July and the platform should be live by September 2023.

NFTicket — one ticket to bind them all

NFTicket is a set of smart contracts which provide the core business logic for mobility and other rental (“check-in/check-out”) services.

In itself, it is an independent and flexible component. This is used within bloXmoveNG as well as for the tokenization of energy certificates and event ticketing/memberships as in the recently held Baden-Württemberg state digital summit (“Digitalgipfel”).

NFTicket for mobility has been designed to provide the following five functionalities, each with their own application and use cases.

1. Vouchers,
2. Coupons,
3. Tickets,
4. Collections and memberships,
5. Certificates of ownership, e.g., Renewable Energy Certificates or certifications e.g., Academic Proof.

Community Phase: Purpose and Goals

The purpose of everything we will be doing over the next period of 3–6 months is to

• Hand over the running platform and the bloXmoveNG brand to Decentralized Mobility Ltd in Nigeria.
• bloXlab, a commercial entity, will provide support to new projects and access to know-how on bloXmove technology and the NFTicket smart contracts when required. Examples are the support of bloXmoveNG as well as finalization of the deployment to peaq.
• Transition from the “Venture building” approach governing bloXmove to date to “Community-based development”. Pls. refer to the section on decentralization re. the why and how.

For this, we will be focusing on two main workstreams:

1. Governance and Decentralization.
2. Kick-off for a community-controlled and ultimately open-source development roadmap.

Decentralization — the Holy Grail of web3 services?

Decentralization seems to be a canvas on which many of us, many at bloXmove among them, project their hopes for a better world.

Don’t we all yearn for more fairness, more equitable markets as self-sovereign individuals engaging within a community of peers?

Wouldn’t mutual(ized) cooperation using a public domain infrastructure which is accessible and barrier-free empower us all?

Well — that’s the dream and the vision.

The time has come now for bloXmove to actually go fully decentralized and transition to a community-governed project.

We are working on the first governance proposal which will base control over the project on BLXM ownership, use of the platform and valuable contributions to the ecosystem.

Skin in the game!

Decentralization in tokenomics: the regulatory background

Much closer to our everyday business of launching and operating the bloXmove protocol for Decentralized Mobility is the question of how to ensure the token at the core of the protocol — BLXM — is sufficiently well-governed to satisfy increasingly stringent governance and regulation criteria.

This is needed both from a perspective of offense as well as defense:

Offense: by transitioning the project to impeccably decentralized governance and activating crystal-clear token utility, the project becomes eligible for the highest form of exposure: e.g. listing on Coinbase.

Defense: Regulators have become increasingly aggressive in going after token projects. The two regulatory frameworks to be taken into account and the requirements to be satisified, are:

1. Financial regulation — such as the SEC or the ESMA etc.
2. Tax rules.

To avoid contravening rules and regulations originating in either, we need to ensure that governance and the utility of the tokens are clear and satisfy the essential needs:

• BLXM must not be a security.
• BLXM must have a clear utility.
• BLXM is not offered as an investment product.
• There is no commercial and taxable entity or team holding control or responsibility for the project.

What needs to be done and why Coinbase?

Coinbase regularly approaches pre-screened token projects in order to ensure they fulfil regulatory requirements, which must be satisfied for any type of further consideration.

This document and the roadmap behind it is to some extent triggered by past communication initiated by the Coinbase Business Development team with regards to bloXmove’s relationship to the BLXM token.

The conversation started mid-April 2023 and was concluded with the answers shown in this document by end of May 2023.

Coinbase being — next to Kraken — one of only two major CEX of which we can be confident that they will be able to withstand the current regulatory attacks led by the SEC and Gary Gensler, we decided to accept the opportunity given to us and take up the challenge.

Their very well-researched findings are clearly formulated to ensure that BLXM

• is a utility token,
• is NOT an investment product,
• is NOT a security.

Our main current challenge or shortcoming is that as an organization we are not decentralized enough.

We fully agree with the findings as well as the suggestions on how to mitigate them and will base our approach towards decentralization on the criteria presented to us by Coinbase..

Furthermore, a Coinbase listing — if achieved — is a desirable listing option for us; as it is reputable, has good volume and its vision on decentralization aligns with ours.

Disclaimer

Neither the initial outreach nor the ensuing discussion in any way provide a statement or a guarantee on whether or when listing will occur.

What is however given, is a clear indication of negative — exclusionary — criteria which must be eliminated in order to qualify for possible listing.
Actual listing will be judged on its own merit. This process has not been initiated.

The BLXM community is encouraged to initiate that process if and when the negative exclusionary criteria have been addressed and solved in a way satisfactory to the listing exchange.

Coinbase requirements in a nutshell

1. Community controls BLXM treasury and governs all BLXM activities
2. Founder team to take a step back from centralized control and to head to new individual roles.
3. bloXmove to transition to being a decentrally governed project.
4. The protocol must not operate any commercial entities: bloXmoveNG to stand on its own feet. As far as (the decentralized) bloXmove/BLXM protocol goes, bloXmoveNG is one service using the composable protocol and being advised in this through the technical team of bloXlab.

The road ahead

Within the transition phase being kicked-off with this paper, our focus will be to:

1. Empower the community to take over governance of the project and its ecosystem.
2. Detach the team and commercial entities from controlling the project.
3. Open-source our full tech stack so tech contributions are possible and granted via special programs.
4. Remove the concerns regarding centralization as expressed by Coinbase and similar trusted companies while looking forward into improving and strengthening the BLXM ecosystem.
5. Finalize ongoing development projects.
6. Set up the operational infrastructure for the community to be able to control the project.

Community Control

Let’s start with the good news:

The BLXM Token Foundry deposits all of its treasury tokens into a governance pool. This pool will be governed by the accredited BLXM token holders, referred to as “The Community” in the remainder of this paper.

Community members will be allocated voting shares according to the number of tokens they present, weighted by the duration they stake the tokens and other forms of contributing to the protocol (use of the platform, contributions…).

In addition the code will be released from its current closed github repository to a community-owned git repository.

The accredited BLXM token holders — “the BLXM governance community” — will determine access and roles within the developer community.

Contributions to the code base will be rewarded with governance rights — which are expressed by BLXM tokens.

Transitioning of founding team

As a first step, the centralized decision-making structure of bloXmove needs to shift from the leadership team to the community.
This follows the letter and the spirit of the clear recommendation and requirement re. reducing the criticality and centrality of the team to the success of the project:

“Reduce the activity of the project team to be administrative or ministerial in nature, so that it’s no longer important to the value or success of the project. For example, allow the general public to make changes to the system or network without the project team’s consent, or commit to implementing public proposals that have been voted on by the token holding community regardless of whether the project team agrees with those proposals. This could include applying updates to the network or system code that weren’t supported or developed by the project team. At a minimum, provide a mechanism for the general public to suggest changes to the system or network.”

All members will continue to contribute to bloXmove as stakeholders and active members hereby ensuring a smooth landing on the trajectory towards a new decentralized governance mechanism.

Decouple commercial entities from the decentralized protocol

The European company, which represents bloXmove in Europe, has always kept an organizational (“arms-length”) distance to the Singapore “foundation”, which manages the BLXM token through what is called a “company limited by guarantees” (CLG).

There are currently two commercial entities which need to position themselves similarly clearly:

1. bloXmoveNG
2. bloXlab

Over the course of the following weeks, we will be announcing the actual steps taken by each of these two entities.

The final result will be that each of them is irrefutably independent and distanced at “arms-length” from the entity and the community controlling BLXM.

Token Design: Utility and Governance

Here we quote from the eligibility requirements provided by Coinbase:

“To qualify as “consumptive use or utility” such utility must be unrelated to the ability of token holders to earn profit by passively holding the asset as an investment.

For example, the “lack of utility” risk is present in the following situations:

• When the token merely provides token holders the ability to stake the token in a liquidity pool facilitated by the project team in return for additional tokens or other rewards. This would not generally qualify as “consumptive use or utility.”
• When the token’s only consumptive use or utility is the ability to participate in platform governance, but the governance mechanism is not yet live. “

We will therefore ensure that BLXM utility is well-defined and utilized in practice; such that services consumed within the scope of the BLXM protocol — such as mobility, charging, digitizing Energy Attribute Certificates — and delivered by the smart contracts governed by the Community, always consume BLXM.

In addition, the exact mechanism by which BLXM holders qualify to become Community members with voting rights, needs to be clarified.

As part of the last ongoing development on the core platform, we will finalize the shadow cash and MTP modules (see below), which are needed to fully activate the utility and govern its consumption and deflation cycle.

Future development in bloXmove project

Future developments on the bloXmove protocol will have to be driven, governed and sponsored by the community controlling the BLXM foundation treasury.

The outgoing team — especially those transitioning to bloXlab — will propose and stand available with the accumulated expertise and know-how.

BUIDL — finalize the currently running projects

In our commitment to continue expanding and improving the bloXmove ecosystem, bloXlab will take care of the finalization of ongoing projects with valuable partners including the refactoring of two major modules required for full activation of BLXM utility:

1. Shadow cash
2. Multi-Token payment (MTP)

We will also finalize the deployment of bloXmove on peaq, according to the grant received in June. This will continue during the next weeks and we expect the full technology to be ready by September 2023.

However, the ambition is bigger. As conclusion of this work, peaq and bloXmove will work together towards the migration of our business protocol (NFTicket) targeting the web3 foundation and a migration to peaq’s Polkadot parachain.

The immediate effect of bloXmove empowering #EoT (Economy of Things) and #DePin opens new business verticals to be explored. bloXlab is and will be available to support any initiative in this direction or any other direction that benefits the bloXmove ecosystem.

These high-potential ongoing projects, with major strategic impact, have been committed to by the bloXmove core team and are being executed and approaching delivery.

Once the currently ongoing development activities are finalized, whether to move forward, how to do it and any other related decision will be within the scope of the decision power of The Community.

Further development can then either be based on individual contributions or be managed through grants to groups of developers, with bloXlab as one among them.

Develop the governance infrastructure

The first step for control and contribution is transparency: bloXmove source code needs to be and will be fully shared in a community controlled repository. This means, anyone can use the software, improve it or propose improvements for the community to support.

Ongoing communication among Community developers will be managed through a token-gated Discord channel. We propose integrating this with our Zealy portal to allow us to incentivise and reward active contributors in the gamified way Zealy so well supports.
As part of the transition to full decentralization, BLXM stakeholders will be given control over the main branch — what gets included, what needs to be improved, when and how contributions will be rewarded.

The bloXmove Discord community is expected to gain more relevance in all tech related topics ultimately becoming the central forum to determine the BLXM development roadmap.