Blockchain and carsharing are changing the image of the cities. How modern technologies are bringing the traffic into the 21st century.

Maciej Zieliński

31 Mar 2020
Blockchain and carsharing are changing the image of the cities. How modern technologies are bringing the traffic into the 21st century.

There is over a billion of cars in the world. We are basically in love with them, even though they have brought many issues. Unfortunately they can't be ignored anymore, we need to face them. Perhaps technologies such as blockchain will help us bring the balance to the streets or even reduce the carbon footprint the cars create.


With the growing urbanisation rate the topic of the increasing issue of traffic has kept returning. The citizens of huge urban sprawls are most probably familiarised with many hour long traffic jams which complicate their lives with huge delays. The experts agree that the problem lies in the amount of the cars owned by people. Because the majority of them utilises the fossil fuels, they also contribute towards the climate change and the environmental pollution. However, despite all of the red flags, it may be impossible to find an alternative in the closest future. That’s why, the solutions which offer a reformation to the existing systems are so important.

As far as the reduction of air pollution goes, many see hope in the electric drive. However its current price makes it inaccessible to most consumers. 

It’s worth asking a question, however, if the majority of people really need to have a car of their own.


High costs of purchasing a car or its long-term renting and the need of a costly maintenance can become absurd when in reality the vehicle is used sparsely 
For many people, the solution to this predicament might be the carsharing, a practice which has recently growing in popularity. 

Such a solution might definitely change the nature of our perception towards the cars. If we are using rentable cars in moderation, they are much cheaper and practical than the ones we own. The consumers use them only if they are necessary. They do not need to suffer the costs of maintenance and car parking fees. Carsharing can allow the traffic to be reduced, reducing the amount of parked cars and cars entering the city centre. Thanks to the services such as the 4mobility, more and more people can additionally choose the electric car which is by far a better choice for the environment.

The potential of carsharing was noticed by the McKinsey report which priced the value of the global market of shared economy at 54 trillion dollars in 2016. It also estimated that this value shall be growing by 30% per year until year 2030. It is to no surprise that this topic was fetched by the start-ups and the global companies alike.


Carsharing and blockchain

Despite the growing popularity, the carsharing procedures could definitely use some improvements. Revolutionary blockchain technology can help the potential of carsharing be truly realised.

Basing the platform on the decentralised blockchain network can help the companies at creating the transparent, potentially global systems. Thanks to the dispersion of databases between the users , the data stored within them such as the ratings of the renters or financing the very platforms, they can be regularly verified. This makes the service incredibly reliable and resistant to manipulations.

By using the smart contracts, the direct transactions between the parties could be carried out without the need of third parties, making the carsharing much more accessible.

On the other hand the cryptocurrency transactions, carried out by Derant for example, can free the users from the costs of conversion charges. Thanks to this the final price is only dependent on the conversion factor of the users’ bank. Thanks to that, the accessibility of the service can become global.

Siemens is thinking of blockchain

The usage of blockchain technology in carsharing has caught the attention of Siemens. The sister company of the German titan- siemens mobility is trying to explore its potential in the incoming years. Its goals include improving the processes of refuelling, parking or the delivery of the desired vehicle. 


Public transport

Carsharing is also a perfect solution for people who don’t use their car every day and use the public transport for commuting. It turns out that the blockchain technology can aid us here too.


Increasing the transparency

When car breaks down on the way to work, one person will be incapable of reaching their destination. However, if the bus breaks down, there will be around 50 people late to their work. The information about the condition of the vehicle he is taking is very important for the passenger. Both for his comfort and his safety.

Accidents with burning buses in Rome in 2017 show us the lethal effects of negligence of the public transportation. By making the data about their condition available in the blockchain network, it would be possible have an insight upon the status of the buses and other vehicles and allow for a quicker problem solving in that matter. 

Blockchain allows for registration of all the processes which are carried out by the bus – from its creation to all of its repairing. Thanks to the saving system in the library of blocks its easy to track the entire chain and to find the potential omits.

Such a system is resistant to manipulations – the data which was once saved on the blocks cannot be altered. Due to its decentralisation there is no supervision by the superior party. This means that in case of an emergency, no party could change or delete the information which would become detrimental to it. 



Ticket sales


Currently, the passenger is often forced to buy an additional ticket to travel from one city to another. Its very uncomfortable  and can bring additional costs.

Platforms such as Dovu have a chance to change this through the power of blockchain by allowing to pay for the tickets with the special tokens. Thanks to this the comfort of the passenger is increased because he can buy all of the tickets with the use of one app with one form of payment. 

Blockchain and the digitalisation of the documentation

To make the communal transport a worthy replacement of the private forms of transport, the infrastructure must be upgraded. However, with a greatly expanded infrastructure comes a greatly expanded documentation. The majority is kept in a paper form. On a global scale, the digitalisation of such data would bring a great conservation of paper. Thanks to that the Public transport would become even more ecological.

Due to many reasons, decentralised databases would be more optimal than the traditionally used centralised ones. First of all they are much more resistant to manipulation. Secondly, thanks to the dispersion of data it can be much more resistant to destruction. When the data is stored in many places, it can be restored easily when one of the databases is lost.

Range of benefits


The following examples show us how the human mobility can be change with the usage of the blockchain technology. Creating tokens, outsourcing the services of blockchain like Nextrope did with the Value and the Alior Bank, can help us change the way we perceive the means of transportation. They can reduce the costs and positively benefit the environment. They can also increase the comfort of the passengers. They help at improving of the working conditions of Taxi drivers. They build new, more beneficial models of the car traffic and the public transport. Blockchain brings a new perspective and a fresh start for many of the ideas existing in the context of  means of transportation.

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Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Kajetan Olas

22 Nov 2024
Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Authors of the contents are not affiliated to the reviewed project in any way and none of the information presented should be taken as financial advice.

In this article we analyze tokenomics of Aethir - a project providing on-demand cloud compute resources for the AI, Gaming, and virtualized compute sectors.
Aethir aims to aggregate enterprise-grade GPUs from multiple providers into a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network). Its competitive edge comes from utlizing the GPUs for very specific use-cases, such as low-latency rendering for online games.
Due to decentralized nature of its infrastructure Aethir can meet the demands of online-gaming in any region. This is especially important for some gamer-abundant regions in Asia with underdeveloped cloud infrastructure that causes high latency ("lags").
We will analyze Aethir's tokenomics, give our opinion on what was done well, and provide specific recommendations on how to improve it.

Evaluation Summary

Aethir Tokenomics Structure

The total supply of ATH tokens is capped at 42 billion ATH. This fixed cap provides a predictable supply environment, and the complete emissions schedule is listed here. As of November 2024 there are approximately 5.2 Billion ATH in circulation. In a year from now (November 2025), the circulating supply will almost triple, and will amount to approximately 15 Billion ATH. By November 2028, today's circulating supply will be diluted by around 86%.

From an investor standpoint the rational decision would be to stake their tokens and hope for rewards that will balance the inflation. Currently the estimated APR for 3-year staking is 195% and for 4-year staking APR is 261%. The rewards are paid out weekly. Furthermore, stakers can expect to get additional rewards from partnered AI projects.

Staking Incentives

Rewards are calculated based on the staking duration and staked amount. These factors are equally important and they linearly influence weekly rewards. This means that someone who stakes 100 ATH for 2 weeks will have the same weekly rewards as someone who stakes 200 ATH for 1 week. This mechanism greatly emphasizes long-term holding. That's because holding a token makes sense only if you go for long-term staking. E.g. a whale staking $200k with 1 week lockup. will have the same weekly rewards as person staking $1k with 4 year lockup. Furthermore the ATH staking rewards are fixed and divided among stakers. Therefore Increase of user base is likely to come with decrease in rewards.
We believe the main weak-point of Aethirs staking is the lack of equivalency between rewards paid out to the users and value generated for the protocol as a result of staking.

Token Distribution

The token distribution of $ATH is well designed and comes with long vesting time-frames. 18-month cliff and 36-moths subsequent linear vesting is applied to team's allocation. This is higher than industry standard and is a sign of long-term commitment.

  • Checkers and Compute Providers: 50%
  • Ecosystem: 15%
  • Team: 12.5%
  • Investors: 11.5%
  • Airdrop: 6%
  • Advisors: 5%

Aethir's airdrop is divided into 3 phases to ensure that only loyal users get rewarded. This mechanism is very-well thought and we rate it highly. It fosters high community engagement within the first months of the project and sets the ground for potentially giving more-control to the DAO.

Governance and Community-Led Development

Aethir’s governance model promotes community-led decision-making in a very practical way. Instead of rushing with creation of a DAO for PR and marketing purposes Aethir is trying to make it the right way. They support projects building on their infrastructure and regularly share updates with their community in the most professional manner.

We believe Aethir would benefit from implementing reputation boosted voting. An example of such system is described here. The core assumption is to abandon the simplistic: 1 token = 1 vote and go towards: Votes = tokens * reputation_based_multiplication_factor.

In the attached example, reputation_based_multiplication_factor rises exponentially with the number of standard deviations above norm, with regard to user's rating. For compute compute providers at Aethir, user's rating could be replaced by provider's uptime.

Perspectives for the future

While it's important to analyze aspects such as supply-side tokenomics, or governance, we must keep in mind that 95% of project's success depends on demand-side. In this regard the outlook for Aethir may be very bright. The project declares $36M annual reccuring revenue. Revenue like this is very rare in the web3 space. Many projects are not able to generate any revenue after succesfull ICO event, due to lack fo product-market-fit.

If you're looking to create a robust tokenomics model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure your project’s resilience in the long term.

Quadratic Voting in Web3

Kajetan Olas

04 Dec 2024
Quadratic Voting in Web3

Decentralized systems are reshaping how we interact, conduct transactions, and govern online communities. As Web3 continues to advance, the necessity for effective and fair voting mechanisms becomes apparent. Traditional voting systems, such as the one-token-one-vote model, often fall short in capturing the intensity of individual preferences, which can result in centralization. Quadratic Voting (QV) addresses this challenge by enabling individuals to express not only their choices but also the strength of their preferences.

In QV, voters are allocated a budget of credits that they can spend to cast votes on various issues. The cost of casting multiple votes on a single issue increases quadratically, meaning that each additional vote costs more than the last. This system allows for a more precise expression of preferences, as individuals can invest more heavily in issues they care deeply about while conserving credits on matters of lesser importance.

Understanding Quadratic Voting

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a voting system designed to capture not only the choices of individuals but also the strength of their preferences. In most DAO voting mechanisms, each person typically has one vote per token, which limits the ability to express how strongly they feel about a particular matter. Furthermore, QV limits the power of whales and founding team who typically have large token allocations. These problems are adressed by making the cost of each additional vote increase quadratically.

In QV, each voter is given a budget of credits or tokens that they can spend to cast votes on various issues. The key principle is that the cost to cast n votes on a single issue is proportional to the square of n. This quadratic cost function ensures that while voters can express stronger preferences, doing so requires a disproportionately higher expenditure of their voting credits. This mechanism discourages voters from concentrating all their influence on a single issue unless they feel very strongly about it. In the context of DAOs, it means that large holders will have a hard-time pushing through with a proposal if they'll try to do it on their own.

Practical Example

Consider a voter who has been allocated 25 voting credits to spend on several proposals. The voter has varying degrees of interest in three proposals: Proposal A, Proposal B, and Proposal C.

  • Proposal A: High interest.
  • Proposal B: Moderate interest.
  • Proposal C: Low interest.

The voter might allocate their credits as follows:

Proposal A:

  • Votes cast: 3
  • Cost: 9 delegated tokens

Proposal B:

  • Votes cast: 2
  • Cost: 4 delegated tokens

Proposal C:

  • Votes cast: 1
  • Cost: 1 delegated token

Total delegated tokens: 14
Remaining tokens: 11

With the remaining tokens, the voter can choose to allocate additional votes to the proposals based on their preferences or save for future proposals. If they feel particularly strong about Proposal A, they might decide to cast one more vote:

Additional vote on Proposal A:

  • New total votes: 4
  • New cost: 16 delegated tokens
  • Additional cost: 16−9 = 7 delegated tokens

Updated total delegated tokens: 14+7 = 21

Updated remaining tokens: 25−21 = 425 - 21 = 4

This additional vote on Proposal A costs 7 credits, significantly more than the previous vote, illustrating how the quadratic cost discourages excessive influence on a single issue without strong conviction.

Benefits of Implementing Quadratic Voting

Key Characteristics of the Quadratic Cost Function

  • Marginal Cost Increases Linearly: The marginal cost of each additional vote increases linearly. The cost difference between casting n and n−1 votes is 2n−1.
  • Total Cost Increases Quadratically: The total cost to cast multiple votes rises steeply, discouraging voters from concentrating too many votes on a single issue without significant reason.
  • Promotes Egalitarian Voting: Small voters are encouraged to participate, because relatively they have a much higher impact.

Advantages Over Traditional Voting Systems

Quadratic Voting offers several benefits compared to traditional one-person-one-vote systems:

  • Captures Preference Intensity: By allowing voters to express how strongly they feel about an issue, QV leads to outcomes that better reflect the collective welfare.
  • Reduces Majority Domination: The quadratic cost makes it costly for majority groups to overpower minority interests on every issue.
  • Encourages Honest Voting: Voters are incentivized to allocate votes in proportion to their true preferences, reducing manipulation.

By understanding the foundation of Quadratic Voting, stakeholders in Web3 communities can appreciate how this system supports more representative governance.

Conclusion

Quadratic voting is a novel voting system that may be used within DAOs to foster decentralization. The key idea is to make the cost of voting on a certain issue increase quadratically. The leading player that makes use of this mechanism is Optimism. If you're pondering about the design of your DAO, we highly recommend taking a look at their research on quadratic funding.

If you're looking to create a robust governance model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure that your DAO will stand out as a beacon of innovation and resilience in the long term.