The #FutureOfMobility is decentralized

So a lot of markets are getting more and more fragmented simply because there's a lot more players, urban mobility, every city has between five and 20 providers of urban mobility where the service should actually be one, as far as the user's concerned, very similar in the energy where you used to have one big coal plant per region. Now you have, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of solar panels also, when you compare fueling to charging the factor of charging stations needed in comparison to fuel stations is in the factor of hundreds. More.

So many things physically already, and market players become more and more fragmented. But on the other side, and this is why the centralized platforms have been so successful because they have always managed to combine these services in a one. Stop offers you everything manner by aggregating and hyper aggregating. You need to combine services among many operators because no single operator in the mobility world or in most other world is actually able to offer you the kind of urban mobility that you as a mobile user can have.

I mean, think about it. You are a moderately mobile person. So you travel to about five to 10 cities over one year. Think about simply a scooter. That's the cheapest form of mobility. If I were a scooter company and I would want to provide scooter mobility for every single city that you go to how much investment, how much asset and how much waste of resources, because these scooters are only available to my users and no other users is this. So the whole concept of urban mobility almost cries out for what in the peer-to-peer economy is already known sharing.

So business to business, sharing existing technologies, non decentralized technologies do not do that. Well, they do that actually very, very bad that's needed, or at least that's the hypothesis upon which the dial mobility blockchain platform was built. But that's also the hypothesis by which blocks move is moving ahead and which our investors are supporting us for. You need open protocols used in a decentralized way, which basically means anybody can plug in, plug out.

None of these technologies or none of these protocols should be contaminated by patent by intellectual property or by license fees. Because the moment you do that, you are serving one economic interest, one specific company, but you're not doing what you really need to here is to, by bringing in that potentially are actually competitors to each other. And that will only work with each other.

If the calculation is a pure and simple win-win situation, and that can never be realized if the coupling protocols between me and you either belong to you or to me, whichever protocols which we use in order to interact in a multi-party system, they must belong to no one, ideally be governed by a neutral org, whether that is the policymaker or local governments or centralized governments or standard organization can be decided depending on the environment. So, and then what do you now need in order to transact real business? So we are very much grown out of the proof of concept stage.

So we have over the last three calendar years developed a software that is production ready. We have eight pilots, eight industrial partners with whom we will take this live now. So the question is not how to test this and how to verify this. The problem is how do you execute business? How do you execute commerce in a decentralized way? And obviously for that, you need a very high degree of trust.

And you need a very high degree of irreversibility because as long as you cannot trust that whatever you're doing is irreversible, you will always have to resort to manual fixing and manual fixing kills automation. If you're in the mobility business, mobility is a low margin business. It's low transaction between half a Euro and 20 Euro is the range of transactions. It's low margin so far is profitable in this business. And it's relatively high frequency in terms of financial transactions. So using the standard banking system with zero content, as we know it now will not.

It's too much friction. You need fully trusted bookkeeping consensus on the business facts, but you also need to know that whatever business facts you are committing to a distributed ledger or a blockchain is actually true in the physical world. And the only way you can do that is by verifying who has done what with whom, meaning you need facts, credentials, verified facts signed by either authorized parties or certified devices, which state what has just happened by whom which provide you a double signature on a constant agreement, meaning a contractual agreement.

And once you have that, then you can commit that to a blockchain as a notary and then the blockchain. And that is what the blockchain does so beautifully keeps the trust with regards to the money, because that is what blockchains do. The consensus protocol in blockchain was built so that nobody needs to worry whether the number in the ledger is right or wrong. The blockchain magic takes care of that. And in order for the blockchain magic to work for anything ex that happens in the real world, you also need proof of what happened in the real world.

And this is where decentralized identifiers D I D and the related protocols come in. And this is by combining now decentralized identifiers, which essentially are used mainly to get signatures either with regard to data. So when a device sends you telematics data stating how much fuel was consumed, how much electricity was charged, how many kilometers it drove, you need to be sure it's that device and no other.

And if you now have a protocol that cryptographically provides you with that security, because you're giving this device an ID, a digital ID, a decentralized identifier, it has a built in cryptographic protocol, which means when it sends you data, you know, that data can never be changed and that's got nothing to do with blockchain. It's very simple just because there's a digital signature on it.

You know, that data cannot be changed because the moment you verify it, the signature will break. So, you know, the data has been tampered with, and between a contractual agreement between a company and a customer, you need an offer, a binding offer signed by a company which has been identified and a binding accepting again, which has been signed by the customer. So it's this capability to provide these signatures in a way that are verifiable, that are proven, and that can be audited and re and checked. That is where digital identifiers form truly the basis for really digital contracting.

Because even though people go around flowing around the term of smart contract left, right and center, I do not know a single blockchain out there that has anything similar to something comparable to a legal contract. It's simply software on chain. And that is all it's. But for digital commerce to work, you actually do need a digitally verified contract because how else can you then take the money, book the money and be sure that nobody can come and say, no, no, no, no. You took too much money from me.

You, I was only supposed to pay five, but you took 10. The only way you can prove that is if you have a contractual agreement between the parties and you have proof regarding the billing records, and this is where the signature mechanisms and the cryptographic protocols that come with the ID, they take care of that very, very beautifully. All right. So how do you then handle a mobility RUP term platform?

Essentially you need identity management for customer, for car and for company, company, customer car, the identity triangle, because any, and all exclusively covered any, and all transaction can always be expressed with these three subjects and objects. You don't need to go beyond that. Any business fact will always can always be limited company customer. And if you don't make it car, call it device, but then you really covered it. Charging station, whatever you can always express your business facts.

In those three, you build a smart contract that verifies the contractual agreement with reference to these identities, and that forms the basis to be able to settle your transaction from which you can go to seamless revenue distribution in realtime, fully consolidated, including the capability for completely frictionless micropayment. Because again, that's what distributed ledgers do quite beautifully. All right. The technology here is I've mentioned it already. Digital identities is the top layer.

The smart contracting, meaning the software on chain is the middle layer where you handle the transaction processing. And then at the bottom, the third layer is the true distributed ledger where essentially your booking liabilities accounts receivable accounts payable between independent parties that do not trust each other, but that trust the protocol because in cryptography and into the protocol and in the consensus on the chain, we can trust. All right? So I'm not sure how I am with time. I need a marker.

If I'm overrunning, all of this is based on the wallet in all of this, the wallet becomes the new, what the browser was for the web until now is the wallet in the new web three zero, why the wallet is, and that is very similar to the real physical wallet that you have in your back pocket or in your bag. The wallet happens to also contain some cash.

Yes, but most of wallet holds your ID card. It holds your credit card. It holds your health insurance card. It holds your club memberships. So it holds your Canon identity, your personal wise, your national ID document, and a number of auxiliary identifiers, such as your health insurance, your club membership. It is also addressable. That is beautiful. It's a URL. So essentially a D I D behaves very much like an HTTPS URL, which you assign to individual objects and last but not least. And that is the beauty where indeed you get to the economy of things.

Peter mentioned earlier, it, because it has the capability to hold tokens. It actually provides the ability to do truly frictionless value transfer. And with this, I will close.

So, so in the end, what you have as autonomous driving or semi-autonomous driving is coming before the cars will be driving around autonomously. They will already have become autonomous economic agents because by providing the car with a wallet, by providing the customer with a wallet, and in fact, the company with a custodian wallet, you have achieved two things from a technical perspective, you have achieved simplicity and ease of scalability because all of them use the very same protocol. It's one set of software. The one just happens to be in a phone.

The other one happens to be in a little black ugly box. And the third one happens to be on the cloud, but the wallet software is totally identical. So your software paradigm is the same, no matter whether you're dealing with machines, devices, companies, or people, that is the important part. It is end to end cryptographically secure, and it forms the key container with which all of the economy of things will be conducted. It will all be managed and contained within wallets. And our thesis is you only need three concepts here, company, customer, or car or company, customer, and device.

And this is how it looks in the end. And with that our end. So from a layering scheme, you basically have companies on behalf of device, and then you have devices. A device can never be a legal entity. So it always needs to have a proof that it belongs to a certain company, the charging station, for instance, or the car you have people with, with identity, you have cars with hardware, wallets, and you have companies with custodian, wallets. They are identified at the identity level. Then they do digital contracting, better called probably software on chain.

So very, very secure context software, which you know, is auditable and can be proven to be correct. And is part of the consensus protocol. And then at the end, you have financial settlement where the whole distributed technology story comes really to its full benefit and to its full utilization.

If you now managed to partner up like we have with banks, then you are also able to actually translate all of that Eban to ledger into the real payment world, because then by connecting distributed ledger to bank accounts, to Eban and doing that in a seamless manner like we are doing, then you can actually combine the world of regulated finance e-money bank account Eban with a much more powerful, but much less regulated world of distributed ledger and seamless value transactions. All right. I will leave it at that.

And this will be, this is essentially as we look from a business perspective, what is the roadmap and where will these technologies really come to fruition?