A crypto platform is disrupting Uber in Nigeria and I bet you never heard about it.

Uber, Bolt and other centralised ride hailing apps have a business model based on exploitation: they gain market share in an area by offering cheap rides and when they have achieved a high enough market share they turn on the fees. Apps like these will take anywhere from 20-30% in fees, this is money going out of the local economy and to the pockets of rent seeking companies in the first world. If your car breaks down: bad luck those fees you paid were just for using the platform.

Crypto offers a fantastic solution:

BloXmove (developed by Daimler – parent company of Mercedes) for 3 years then launched as a decentralised platform) is a platform for decentralised mobility (on Celo + PEAQ) and energy flexibility (with energyweb). It has launched an Uber competitor that is live in Nigeria. You can download the app in any app store and use your normal credit card, all payments are handled on crypto rails in the background. Basically what we have been asking for for years: no need to touch/understand crypto to gain the benefits.

The drivers are loving it because there are no rent seeking middle men: the users co-own the platform and the max 5% fees are used for development. They are in talks with the national drivers union in Nigeria, founded to combat the predatory practices of the likes of Bolt and Uber, so it could quickly scale to a population of 300M in that country alone. Everything is open source with the idea being that it can be launched by anyone anywhere integrated with subDAOs for governance and development.

Graphs of adoption through this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/BloXmove/status/1704187277574824262?t=5zuJArfKrdGW9-19etRqmw&s=19

This is the purpose of Crypto: giving the power back to the people. But to find it you will have to dig all the way to top2000 on Coin Market Cap, because even more than 13 years since BTC launched people are still more interested in meme coins than actually using blockchain to better people’s lives.