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.
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.
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.
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.
About the Author
Boyd Cohen is the CEO and Co-founder of Iomob, a decentralized internet of mobility (IoM) network. Since obtaining his Ph.D. in strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado in 2001, he spent the past two decades focused on accelerating the path to a low-carbon sustainable economy. This included publishing 3 books, multiple peer reviewed articles, frequently contributing to Fast Company and starting a handful of ventures in the smart cities and sustainability arena.
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