A Decentralized Ride-Sharing Economy To Benefit Locals
Eva’s team is enthusiastic about building their cooperative ride-sharing application on the decentralized EOSIO blockchain platform. Keeping it local is the critical foundation of their innovative project.
The Blockchain Alternative To Uber
Raphaël Gaudreault, Eva’s co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, explains how localization came to take center stage. “In late 2017, Uber threatened the government of Quebec, Canada, with leaving the province if its rules were not relaxed,” he says. Along with Dardan Isufi, a fellow student of Software Engineering and Political Science who is now Eva’s Chief Optimization Officer, he began pondering the issue. They came to the conclusion that “traditional ride-sharing companies aggregate the economy at cities’ expense and disregard local regulations.”
The problem as they saw it with this segment of the so-called sharing economy was that wealth was being extracted from local markets. “These companies capture around a quarter of market share versus standard taxis, but the money is invested in capitalization in other countries. They simply aggregate the economy and delocalize it.”
Buoyed by a sense of idealism, Gaudreault, who is Quebecois, and Isufi, whose roots are in Albania, quickly assembled a multinational team of development talent — including Max Gravitt, from the US, and Merouane Benthameur, from Algeria — to find innovative solutions that redressed these flaws in ways that might, so to speak, disrupt the sector’s earlier disruptors.
Drivers Get The Lion Share In The Eva Economy
Eva is intended to work as a network of cooperatives based around a new relationship between driver and passenger members that removes the middleman. As the Eva website states: “The core of the project is its decentralized network, which uses blockchain technology in order to organize urban mobility on a global scale while ensuring a redistribution of the profits generated at the local scale.”
In the Eva model, 85% of each transaction goes to the driver, with the remainder being split between members of the co-operative, an ecosystem “treasury” and a foundation responsible for maintaining the network. Blockchain automates these allocations, and, according to Eva’s white paper, “improves the ability to integrate different modes of payment while ensuring an anonymous, immutable, and transparent technical protocol.”
“Eva deploys an immutable contract based on the EOS blockchain to offer an open ledger for mobility that keeps members’ data anonymous,” adds Gaudreault. By contrast, he is quick to point out, that data harvested by traditional ride-sharing platforms has been notoriously leaky.
EOSIO’s Scalability And Sustainability Made It An Easy Choice
As for the choice of EOSIO, he cites the platform’s “scalability” and “sustainability” as deciding factors. “EOSIO’s greatest features include its ease of use for developers, C++ and javascript smart contracts, built-in incentives for resource allocation so users do not have to pay to use the system, and its ability to scale to current industrial levels of transaction throughput.”
With the Eva smart contract finalized, the first Eva co-operative began operations in Montreal, in September, and a second is undergoing local registration in Toronto. The app was among those featured in the Block.one Village at the recent Blockchain Live event in London, Reddit forums have been ablaze with interest, and the team is hopeful of further launches in locations as diverse as Algiers, Pristina, Houston, and New York in the near future. A new iteration of the sharing economy may well be upon us.
More information on the Eva app is available at //eva.coop
Originally Published Here
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Chris Munch is a professional cryptocurrency and blockchain writer with a background in software businesses, and has been involved in marketing within the cryptocurrency space. With a passion for innovation, Chris brings a unique and insightful perspective to the world of crypto and blockchain. Chris has a deep understanding of the economic, psychological, marketing and financial forces that drive the crypto market, and has made a number of accurate calls of major shifts in market trends. He is constantly researching and studying the latest trends and technologies, ensuring that he is always up-to-date on the latest developments in the industry. Chris’ writing is characterized by his ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and concise manner, making it accessible to a wide audience of readers.
