Let’s enable Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

In a decentralized model — whereby the blockchain ensures the trust — this would happen:

In addition to unfair pricing, it is also in the best interest of central corporations to leverage an infrastructure in which they gain control over your personal data and are able to use it for corporate objectives. Furthermore, central corporations would like to keep exclusive rights over intellectual property in order to keep ahead of the competition. This slows down the development of MaaS solutions that can integrate and contribute to the greater good of society.

We are not trying to say that our primary goal with VMC GO is to take on centralized corporations such as Uber or Lyft.

What we are saying, is that we have access to the (blockchain) technology that can establish integration in the MaaS industry. To be precise, we do not only have access to it. We have already build the platform — VMC GO — that is in essence a fair marketplace. A marketplace which multiple MaaS apps can plug into simultaneously. Thereby, creating an autonomous economy without market flaws and shareholders benefiting from unfair pricing.

Public institutions and the quality conflict

Approaching the problem from a public perspective works in theory, but fails in practice.

In theory, a state would love to create a mobility ecosystem — where its citizens would benefit from — without seeking to be profitable. Therefore, it takes out the economic conflict of push and pull, mentioned above. But attempting to create such a marketplace with public organizations poses bigger threats.

Obviously, we have the classic argument that public projects do not have the right incentive or ‘market pressure’ to create great projects. As displayed in theDutch project, whereby at least 1.5 million euros were burnt in creating a comprehensive system — without success. This is painful, because that is tax money all citizens paid for.

But, a bigger issue would be security. A network maintained by one single organization would have a single point of failure. Which makes forging data, or duplicating travel funds relatively easy.

Security issues have wider implications, though…

Anonymous travelling

A very contemporary issue is persevance of privacy. Where do corporations — public or private — use our personal travel data for? Several studies have shown that it is near impossible to travel fully anonymously. Also, specialized anonymous travel products may betray users’ privacy expectations.

The VMC GO wallet will enable fully anonymous travel, because no one owns the travel data. The only data stored on the blockchain are transactions between the public keys. Even with huge sums of external data it would be nearly impossible to link an identity to a public key.

Integration, Speed and Convenience

As a user in the current MaaS industry, you are engaging with different providers at the same time. You are part of a ride-sharing platform, you have installed your travel application and you have your local public transport cards/subscriptions. Each, functioning on its own set of (payment) rules and terms.

A situation whereby you have one application providing you with all the mobility service you need, would be more convenient. But, convenience is not the biggest problem we are trying to solve here.

Speed is…

When the user base of VMC GO grows — because of convenience and fair pricing — it will become more attractive for providers to join VMC GO as well. Since they have open market access to a large pool of users. More providers means more possible services. Services, users can buy with the same wallet and token (VAI). This would increase the travel speed of all users and would make it more attractive for new users to join as well. As new users join, the cycle continues, perfecting and streamlining itself as we go.

As we VMC GO.