Blockchain as a concept has burst forth from the backchannel discussions among technologists over the past year into the mainstream consciousness. While the chances are now pretty good that even non-technically oriented people have at least heard the term, few are likely to have any clue what it means or what its uses are. One that does is Noam Copel, CEO and founder of the DAV foundation and he and his team are trying to use it create some of the connective tissue for the future mobility ecosystem.
The ultimate goal is to create a decentralized transportation network that enables any number of companies to participate with any number of customers. Much like the internet, any user on this network can communicate and transact with any other user whether those users are people or vehicles. This is in distinct contrast to today’s situation where almost every mobility service provider such as carsharing, ride-hailing, micro transit or mass transit is siloed from all of the others. Blockchain lies at the heart of this open-source networking system.
An open-platform such as the one envisioned by Copel and DAV Foundation could prove to be extremely important to the new mobility ecosystem. In addition to letting many companies participate and collaborate, it can potentially help to achieve the some of the full societal benefits of a shared, autonomous mobility system. The long-term goal is to reduce the number of vehicles on urban streets and utilize those that are left more completely so vehicles aren’t sitting around taking up real estate or trolling for parking spaces. That will require a multi-modal system that enables people to go back and forth between, bikes, cars and both intra and inter-city mass transit.
First some backstory. For those that have heard of blockchain, it’s usually in the context of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum. However, it has potential uses that go well beyond these newfangled digital currencies. Blockchain is a mechanism for creating a distributed, encrypted digital ledger. The functionality is partially contained in the name. Every transaction in a particular ecosystem is recorded as a block which also contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block.
A hash is just a chunk of seemingly random bits that is calculated by passing a set of data through an encryption algorithm. No matter how big the original data set, the hash will always be the same size although the values contained in it will differ. If implemented correctly, you can’t get back the original data from the hash. However, you can always run the original data through the same algorithm and it should return the same hash result. Thus if the hash changes, you can check if the original data has been tampered with. Since each new transaction contains a hash in part based on the previous hash, there is a fixed chain that goes all the way back to the origin.
So what does any of this have to do with mobility services? The increasingly broadly held expectation among a wide swath of automotive industry leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and urban planners is that the days of the personally owned vehicle are quickly drawing to a close. Instead, in the coming years we will probably be utilizing a range of shared, connected and automated transportation options. The timing for this transition is open to much more debate.
Regardless of when it happens, we will require some new supporting infrastructure to make this new business viable and Copel is developing part of it through the DAV Foundation. Think of DAV as analogous to TCP/IP, the open protocols that define the fundamentals of how all devices on the internet talk to each other. The billions of devices on the network today send everything from video and audio streams to plain text messages. But in order for any device to talk to any other arbitrary device, they need an address to communicate with, data in a particular format of packets and a few other bits of information.
Devices throw messages on the network like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean. The difference is that even if it doesn’t understand the language of the message, every device can read the TCP/IP data written on the bottle and send it on to the right location.
“If you think of TCP/IP, it’s basically a transport protocol,” said Copel. “The point with DAV is why not do that with actual physical transportation? When vehicles become autonomous, you can move objects and people with code.”
DAV’s blockchain is intended to be that protocol for mobility, enabling peer-to-peer transactions. It can consolidate a variety of pieces of relevant information related to a transaction from different players, including insurance, service fees, charging and more without any one company having control of all the information.
The blockchain is based on the same definition used for the ethereum cryptocurrency and running on top of the same network. The foundation will be issuing a fixed number of DAV tokens through an initial coin offering in the coming weeks but they are not really intended to be used as a general currency like bitcoin or ethereum and won’t be utilized for payments on DAV. Instead, they are used more as identifiers for the smart contracts that will be tracked in the blockchain and transferred around among the various participants in the transactions.
Like TCP/IP, the DAV blockchain is the underlying infrastructure that enables all types of potential mobility business models. DAV has been in development for about a year and has been tested with some drone and robotics applications. The protocols and blockchain are open-source and can be utilized by anyone.
The DAV Foundation is a non-profit based in Zurich, Switzerland. Companies wishing to utilize DAV can purchase tokens the tokens to help fund the work of the foundation. According to Copel, the foundation itself has no business model and is not intending to compete in any with the companies using the DAV network. Instead, Copel wants to incentivize companies to create for-profit enterprises on this platform.
Copel himself along with others will get some undefined number of the tokens and if the platform takes off, he will financially benefit from the value of the tokens. At this point Copel says DAV is about six months away from reaching out to automotive OEMs and other interested parties.
Porsche recently announced that it is already conducting tests on applications using blockchain. These include locking and unlocking vehicles via an app, temporary access authorizations and encrypted data logging. This could be utilized in many ways such as allowing a delivery person to open the trunk of a vehicle to deliver a package or for peer-to-peer car rentals like those done through Turo. Porsche is working with a Berlin-based startup called Xain. However, given the open-source nature of the DAV platform, it’s possible that XAIN could build its services on that platform or at least make it compatible.
This is just the beginning of blockchain applications for mobility and whenever the new world of transportation arrives, this will likely be part of it.
