#RIDER SHARE DRIVERS#
#RIDER SHARE DRIVER#

Each city will have their own DAO, which will be responsible for choosing franchisees.

Besides being tradable for real money, these tokens will also confer the right to vote in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-a kind of member-run organization whose internal rules are encoded into a blockchain.

So far the company has received about 60 franchise requests from cities across the world, says Sheikh.Ībout 30 percent of DRF tokens have also been reserved for an “ecosystem fund,” which will be used for incentives and rewards for drivers and riders.

But to apply for a franchise, they will need to purchase a large chunk of DRF tokens and lock them up for the duration of their contract. The company plans to operate on a franchise model, with local entrepreneurs bidding to run Drife operations in new cities in return for a share of subscription fees. At present it can’t be used for much, but the token will play an important role in Drife’s expansion plans, says Sheikh. The company also has its own cryptocurrency, called DRF.

This means pricing is purely market-driven, and because Drife isn’t taking a cut, fares should be cheaper than alternatives, says Sheikh.

The rider then chooses who to go with based either on price or driver ratings. “A centralized entity who has a profit motive in the fare that I pay as a rider will start manipulating the fare and exploiting it for their own profit motive, and that’s where both drivers and riders struggle.”Ī base fare is set based on the class of vehicle and the distance of the trip, but after that riders can boost the amount they are willing to pay to attract more drivers. “We don’t charge anything from the fare that you pay as a rider,” she says. Drivers get to keep the entire fare and will instead pay a monthly subscription to use the platform, although the company is currently waiving this to encourage sign-ups. One of the main things that differentiates them from companies like Uber, says Sheikh, is that they don’t charge any commission. Today, they have more than 10,000 drivers and 100,000 riders signed up to the platform. Last November, after three years of development, she and her cofounders launched the Drife app in the southern city of Bangalore. So she set out to build a decentralized ride-hailing platform that puts control back into the hands of users via blockchain technology. The problem, Sheikh decided, boiled down to having a middleman controlling the relationship between riders and drivers. Riders also get a raw deal, she says, with little control over what they pay for their rides or who they travel with. But after speaking to drivers she discovered many were unhappy with the commissions the platform charged and the often opaque rules that governed which rides they get assigned. Ride-hailing in India is dominated by Uber and local rival Ola, but startup Drife thinks blockchain technology could be the key to breaking up their duopoly.ĬEO and cofounder Firdosh Sheikh used to be a power user of Uber, racking up more than 5,000 rides in total.

#RIDER SHARE DRIVERS#

#RIDER SHARE DRIVER#

Rider share