Introducing WheelCoin: The 1st Move2Earn app for Mobility
While the Play2Earn and Move2Earn movement has had some early successes and some collapses as well, the crypto community continues to be bullish about the possibility to leverage token economic incentives to enable users to earn while playing or moving.
STEP’N (120mn profit in Q2 of 2022) and SweatCoin (75 million downloads) have paved the way for Move2Earn. While both of those (and other followers) focus on token incentivising walking, no one, until today has sought to apply Move2Earn to encourage sustainable mobility choices.
Yet transportation is both a substantial portion of most families’ budgets, reaching 2nd or 3rd highest category of household spending around the globe and a major source of carbon emissions, and unfortunately one of the only sectors struggling to decrease emissions over 1990 levels.
(https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*1cllJFR6e25_JyGdKHoT0g.png)
Thankfully, a substantial percentage of younger generations (and some of us older ones too), are shifting our preferences away from car ownership and car dependence and towards more sustainable options like transit, trains, bikes and scooters, walking and (EV) carsharing when a car is “needed”.
The Internet of Mobility network has been working to unite the global mobility ecosystem into a trustless and permissionless ecosystem whereby fleet operators can compete and collaborate to offer sustaianble multimodal solutions to the growing global population. Until now, the IoM network has been exclusively focused on making this network available to large demand partners like rail operators (e.g. Brightline Trains in the US, London North Eastern Railway in the UK) airlines (e.g. Vueling Airlines) and others to be announced shortly.
(https://miro.medium.com/max/516/1*yt6eMhLUQ6Ki-1-PLvvLRA.png)
Introducing WheelCoin
Today we are announcing WheelCoin, designed to make it easier and more cost effective for people around the globe to choose sustainable mobility. Why WheelCoin? The majority of mobility vehicles in the world (e.g. scooters, skateboards, buses, bikes, many trains, cars) have wheels. Furthermore, the wheel is regularly cited as one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity (of course the Internet and blockchain are up there too).
The WheelCoin app will be launched as a private beta on September 15th for the first 5,000 OG subscribers. During the beta period, we will be working to calibrate the incentives in a way that will permit a sustainable level of token emissions when the WheelCoin utility token is introduced a few months later. OG subscribers will have several benefits however including: receiving a non-transferable NFT which allows them to begin earning immediately (points first which will be converted to tokens at public launch of the WheelCoin token). Future airdop benefits for OG members are expected as well. If you are interested to join the OG program join us in Discord https://discord.gg/jRhAJEdNQp .
In this early edition of WheelCoin, the app will detect a user’s movements walking, on public transit, rail, and bike. It can also detect if a user is in a car or a plane but neither of those will receive rewards as the goal of WheelCoin is to incentivize a more rapid shift to sustainable mobility. Initially beta users will accrue points which will later be converted to WheelCoin tokens.
In future versions, the Internet of Mobility (IoM) network will be integrated into WheelCoin, allowing users to actually book and pay for green mobility services and receive further incentives (or discounts) on these services. Once the IoM network is integrated, additional modes of mobility will be included in the token incentive model including scooters booked in the app and green vehicles booked in the app (carsharing, car rental and taxis) among others.
Stay tuned for further updates including our token economics, future releases new partnerships and more.
Source: https://medium.com/coinmonks/introducing-wheelcoin-the-1st-move2earn-app-for-mobility-713a571cdc3d
Become one of the first 5k OG members and receive a free non-transferable NFT and access to the beta version in September!
Join Discord https://discord.gg/jRhAJEdNQp
How WheelCoin incentivizes Green Mobility-My own JourneyIn the last few days we started sharing the news that Iomob is launching a new product — WheelCoin. The post from the MaaS Alliance that came out today, August 12th has already resulted in several mobility stakeholders reaching out to learn more how their organizations can participate and to better understand how WheelCoin can stimulate greener choices.
I thought I would share some early insights from my own use of an internal demo version of WheelCoin. I do not drive a car. I have not had a driver’s license since I moved to Barcelona in 2015. So in my case, choosing a car over multimodal journeys is not much of an option anyway:) However there are interesting insights from my own experiences.
Context
I live in a beautiful town outside of Barcelona called Sant Cugat, meanwhile Iomob’s offices are in the heart of Barcelona near Plaza Catalunya.
My normal daily commute involves taking my mountain bike from my house to the Sant Cugat FGCC train station. The train runs every 3–5 minutes so I rarely have to plan my arrival with precision. The train is a nice, comfortable journey of about 25 minutes to Plaza Catalunya and from there, a short walk to our offices in the WeWork building.
(https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*9stbgyBIC73RbV_8FFhguQ.png)
As you can see from the results of an actual one-way multimodal journey, it takes roughly 50 minutes door to door. The WheelCoin app, leveraging the smartphone sensors, GPS and accelerometers is able to detect each leg of my journey and which mode I chose. It calculates the distance travelled in each mode and then tells me how many KGs of CO2 emissions I avoided by not using a normal car for the whole journey. On this day, between my roundtrip to and from the office and walking to lunch, etc. I saved about 4kg of CO2 and earned 4 “Wheelies” (our snarky word for points). We are in beta so we are not launching the official WheelCoin token until we learn from our 5,000 OG users when the app launches September 15th.
In future posts I can go deeper into the token economics of WheelCoin and the role of our NFT program and the overal Move2Earn (M2E) mechanics envisioned for the public app launch post beta.
But the enthusiastic reaction to the MaaS Alliance post and the subsequent dialog it has started regarding how this could be a powerful tool to onboard more people to MaaS and green mobility encouraged me to share a new personal insight I had today that I think anecdotally shows the power of this subtle incentive that could be a nudge away from car dependence and towards sustainable multimodal mobility.
As mentioned I do not drive. But many people who live in Sant Cugat do drive to the Barcelona city center on a regular basis. What is the cost for doing this? Well, for one, we have a peaje (toll) that is usually around 4 euros each way between Sant Cugat and Barcelona. There is 8 euros a day. An average car travels roughly 12km with one liter of gas, so roughly 2 liters of gas roundtrip. As of today that is about 3 euros 50 cents. Parking rates near Plaza Catalunya are at least 15 euros/day. Not factoring in other cost of ownership indicators, this means the same roundtrip journey would cost around 30 euros per day.
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(https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*j4kKwkTZpg3wdiSaSjXQsw.png)
My journey that includes a commuter bike I have owned since 2012, walking (with whatever shoes I have on my feet) and a roundtrip train ticket which costs me about 1 euro 20 cents each way means that I spend about 3 euros per day commuting sustainably, without dealing with traffic, listening comfortable to my favorite crypto podcasts and catching up on emails on the train.
One would think there is enough embedded economic incentives in this journey to encourage even more people to leave their car keys at home. But we are creatures of habit. So nudging can help. WheelCoin tracks my movements and allows me to be proud of the emissions I am saving. But it also rewards me for it with Wheelies which will be converted to tokens which will have a range of ways to accrue value for me personally as a user and for the green mobility ecosystem (and our cities).
This morning, I had a really interesting experience. By random coincidence, my wife, who works from home and does drive, was leaving the house at the exact same time I was to run an errand and offered to drop me off at the train station.
I thought about it for an instant and politely declined realizing I would gain fewer points today and feel guilty about not taking my bike, which is also good exercise for me. I know this is a small anecdote and may not apply to everyone but I hope it provides a little more color on the possibility of gamifying and nudging people to make more sustainable mobility decisions on a regular basis.
Stay tuned for more information about the app launch, game mechanics and more. And if you are inspired, come visit us in Discord and join the OG WheelCoin group which comes with awesome benefits like a free non transferible NFT like this one!(https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*Q6r4KtQFZIbzDsKw1hUdLg.jpeg)
source:https://medium.com/@boydcohen/how-wheelcoin-incentivizes-green-mobility-my-own-journey-8d6f03300053
Become one of the first 5k OG members and receive a free non-transferable NFT and access to the beta version in September!
Join Discord https://discord.gg/jRhAJEdNQp
Join the AMA in the Discord on August 18th, 2022
at 18:00 CET