Two dockless companies recently announced a future release of their own cryptocurrencies:

• while riding a oBike, you’ll be able to earn oCoins! oBike partnered with the Singaporean non-profit organisation Tron, who is operating the eponymous blockchain-based decentralized protocol TRON. Their cryptocurrency, the Tronix (TRX) is ranked 14th worldwide. The more they ride, the more users will earn. They will then be able to pay or top-up they oBike wallet using oCoins, as well as buying products and contents using Tron’s platform. The oCoin will be introduced in the first quarter of 2018.

• while riding a Spin bike, you’ll be able to earn PIN’s! Spin will launch in march 2018 the Pin Protocol, a blockchain-based reputation and rewards protocol, together with PIN, its associated cryptocurrency. Here, the center of the protocol seems to be the reputation thing more than the currency.

 

The Pin Protocol consists of a reputation and rewards engine and a utility token called PIN, which all work hand-in-hand to let asset providers record positive and negative rental behavior in a normalized manner. PIN tokens are issued when positive behavior is recorded, and the recorded user behaviors are algorithmically transformed  into reputation scores, referenceable by asset providers using the Pin Protocol. Pin also has built in arbitration and voting engines, driven by the PIN tokens, to help with self-governance.

Two approaches, as oBike is willing to increase its user base and ride duration by “paying” for it, while Spin is aiming to encourage its users to good behaviour on the bike (read good PARKING behaviour 😉 ). It is the very beginning of the use of blockchain and cryptocurrencies in bike-sharing, so we will have to wait to see more innovation on how to use it. The possibilities are huge and will soon have a huge impact on the different bike-sharing models: can it suppress the need for station-based schemes rebalancing? what about parking behaviour for dockless bike-share systems? Please share your view!!