Yesterday Daimler announced it has licensed its Mobility Blockchain Platform to a brand new startup bloXmove. The new company was founded by CEO Sophia Rödiger, Daimler’s former Digital Transformation Leader and Dr. Harry Behrens, the Head of Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory, until last month.
The startup has a grand ambition to make mobility frictionless. Most journeys involve multiple forms of transport, such as a bus and a train. Rather than buying a single ticket from every mobility provider, the idea is to have one app and a single purchase, and the details are sorted out between the businesses. To achieve this aim will require a global mobility alliance.
However, work within Daimler has understandably focused more on the automotive side. For example, together with multiple startups, it developed a hardware wallet for a car giving it a unique identity. This can be used to enable the short-term rental of cars or scooters amongst numerous other applications.
BloXmove views this as a digital contract solution where a mobility user, uses an app to sign a digital contract with a vehicle. The startup’s platform handles many of the contracting steps from identity and know your customer to consent and payments.
“By granting the software license, we want to make it possible for the platform to be used for other areas of application and thus to reach its full potential. I am very pleased that our successful pilot project is now being continued and further developed at bloXmove,” says Carmen Roth-Schäfer, CTO Daimler Mobility AG.
Previously, one of the most interesting blockchain trials run by Daimler Mobility was in conjunction with Boerse Stuttgart and others for the use of the public Ethereum blockchain to fund industrial machinery, vehicle fleets and energy infrastructure. The concept is that investors get paid based on usage.
Meanwhile, the blockchain consortium MOBI recently released a standard for data sharing within the mobility sector, which might be useful given bloXmove’s goal of frictionless transport. One of the use cases explored included planning for a trip that involves different modes of transportation.
