At bloXmove we took and take the time for building our products, strengthening our business partnerships as well as challenging our own strategies and structures. Following our community values of transparency and participation, we give you an update about what we have been working on the last months and what you can expect for the remainder of 2022 and the upcoming 2023. Let’s start this roadmap update with a statement by someone who you should know:
Vitalik Buterin recently tweeted: it is also a valuable time of finding the focus and cleaning up – only the strongest projects and companies with real use cases will survive.
The market dynamic as well as the global political situation have taken a real turn towards a prolonged slowdown. We see this not only at the crypto level, but all of world finance, industry, economy and personal livelihood seems to be entering a period of retreat and regrouping. As another luminary – Peter Drucker said: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic”
Yesterday’s lessons – tomorrow’s pivot. With this somewhat philosophical introduction, let’s get to what this means for bloXmove.
1) Within our ongoing investment round we understood the following: Investment rounds are more difficult and will take a much longer time than only a year ago. Venture capital firms invest ten times less due to the high interest rates and insecurities. 2) The overall economic situation is entering a slowdown coupled with inflation. 3) Reflexivity, i.e. expectation of negative change shaping behavior and actions, compounds these effects. 4) Traditional mobility is seen as a stagnating sector with less investment potential than previously. Companies save resources, multi-mode offerings turn to become nice to have, but not a must have 5) Sustainable energy as well as electric mobility and the ecosystem surrounding this – such as batteries, charging and vehicle-to-grid – are emerging. Global sustainability goals are the new orientation for countries and companies. 6) Tokenization of assets, certificates and tickets is becoming a topic of relevance. 7) Growth is to be had in emerging markets – at the price of a higher risk profile.
On technology: This means that we are working mainly on our new NFTicket and NFTcertificate protocol as well as the big go live with our bloXmoveNG project in Nigeria. We are happy to say that this protocol is getting a lot of recognition and we have two partners already: NRverse and eQuota. We already launched the bloXmove NFTicket with NRverse during the first green metaverse event a couple of weeks ago and bloXmove Nigeria will go into beta testing within Q4. Here we closely collaborate with the mainnet provider CELO, as we explained in our 6th tech debate.
On business: We focus a lot more on the ‘power meets mobility’ scenario and look for further grant and consortium partners besides EWF, SAP, Tennet etc. – the global sustainability goals, the ambition to increase the renewable energy mix of all countries worldwide and the new technical standards for bi-directional charging give this entire market a new push and potential.
1) NFTicket launch – the frictionless voucher to access power and mobility
NFTicket combines the technology of NFTs with blockchain based components to enable identification, access control, payment and settlement options. It’s a tamper-proof, secure, tradable and collectable format which will bring digital tickets and certificates to the next level. BloXmove will offer three main user flows: Imagine…
You can read more about the technology behind and the use cases we have planned here. Our CTO Harry Behrens also gave interesting insights during the MOBI Lecture which was streamed and recorded. In the last weeks, we could win two first partners for a collaboration. Together with NRverse we developed a NFTicket to certify green energy use in the metaverse. We launched this solution during the first sustainable metaverse event a couple of weeks ago (read more) and are currently working on the next NFTcertificate solution. Here we partner with the market leader of THG quotas in Germany – a certificate which proofs your ownership of an electric vehicle. The analysts of McKinsey, BCG etc. Wrote recently: this new market of ReFi – renewable finance products – will become a trillion-dollar market in the next years. In the coming weeks, we are launching the NFTicket solution for all of you. We are bringing the next generation of tickets and you will be able to test if by yourself directly in our web.
A few weeks ago, we explained you the two different market strategies bloXmove has – the hybrid and emerging market approach. Due to the current financial, political and economic situation worldwide, we see a further slowdown in the very regulated, hybrid markets like Germany. That does not mean that we stop doing our business and projects related to the Mobility Blockchain Platform like in Mittweida, with TIER, Lufthansa Industry Solution. Nope, recently we fully onboarded TIER with all API, but we re-focus for the moment: so, our man- and woman- power goes into product and software development on the tokenization and pure-crypto side as well as the green energy side. Here we see a big pull right now due to new global and local sustainability targets and laws. During our last tech debate, we focused on the bloXmove Nigeria project and invited the local team to join us as well as our project partners from CELO. You can find a recap and summary of the panel with the recorded conversation here.
So again: the current macroeconomic situation and the causes of it have made it clear that bloXmove should focus, even more, on the crypto world. We have decided to push our landing in Nigeria, and we are working on the first pilots of the platform working with local companies and a dedicated local team (see above). ‘Crypto beyond finance’ is the near future and emerging markets are the right place to start pushing it. The bloXmove Nigeria Mobility Platform will be running on CELO and the BLXM token will be deployed and available on CELO blockchain during the next quarter (Q4 2022). Also, we are deploying the BLXM token on the blockchain of Energy Web Foundation (EWF), EWC, with a clear reinforcement of our green and sustainable vision of the tech and the future.
We can announce that we are listing our BLXM token on the global exchange platform WhiteBit in the end of October. Hard times and bear markets do not keep us away from our long-term vision and potential of BLXM. This listing alongside with the deployments on CELO and EWC open new doors for further utility and new applications based on BLXM and support the continuous community expansion.
The energy and eMobility markets are literally energized. We recognized the strongest acceleration in these fields and got the feedback from our partners, advisors and investors: the interconnection of mobility and energy is the sweetest spot today and tomorrow. What did we achieve besides the successfully finished proof of concept with 50hertz and Energy Web Foundation?
In the next months, bloXmove, UnternehmerTUM and the other partners are implementing and validating the green energy tracking application in a real lab. Results will be shown end of this year in Munich, Germany. We applied for two Funded Research Projects with top tier partners of the energy and eMobility industries that will deal with bidirectional charging for private vehicles and commercial fleets.
It is all about scalability. Great to see that we could use and adapt the developed NFTicket solution for NRverse to Mittweida and could onboard further students of the Mittweida University to test the blockchain-based mobility booking system. The ecosystem is growing through more students as well as new partners – so Mittweida gets new types of micro mobility like eBike-Sharing. The next steps for Q4 are:
So, to sum it up: we focus on emerging markets and emerging business models around vehicle-to-grid, sustainable energy, and tokenization of certifications, assets and ticketing. We accept that traditional mobility is undergoing slow-downs and adapt to this. We also extend our horizon towards funding and investment with 6-12 months and streamline operations and staffing in the meantime. All of this is a lot to take in. Therefore, we invite you to our next AMA session with the CEO, CTO and tech team, where we can discuss further open questions about bloXmove, the projects and the strategic pivot: SAVE THE DATE – 5th of October, 5pm CET / 3pm UTC
🛴 🚗 🚋 🚲 🛵 🚌 ✈️
