Uber and Lyft are well-known companies in the ride sharing subsector, but there’s a new entrant, Cryder that has come up with the concept of ride sharing based on blockchain. Cryder intends to introduce ride sharing that give more benefits to drivers as well as place little demand or restrictions on them as a prerequisite to participate in the service.
The Cryder project shall be placing a lot of emphasis on marketing which the company blog announced shall be allocated 50 percent of the funds raised while 33 percent shall be used for the project development. This is ostensibly to bring their services into mainstream of an increasingly popular subsector. The Cryder project which would be launched in March 2018 was described as an autonomous decentralized platform for freelance taxi drivers. The CRT, the project token is the means of transactions and would be made available to users and intending users of the services during the ICO. Everything in the Cryder platform is Ethereum blockchain based and would run on the smart contract and CRT.
There has been a criticism of the Cryder concepts as being skewed to favor drivers in a bid to make the contract attractive to them at the expense of security which analysts say is a critical factor to in a ride sharing business based on reports and experiences of older companies such as Uber. That Cryder has pushed the need for anonymity higher by creating a token comparable to Monero could make it attractive to users with nefarious intent. The CRT emphasizes stealth with its reliance on what is known as the whisper protocol that conceals personal information such as credit card details thereby making users of the service virtually ‘untraceable’.
This might not be a strength, as experience has shown with established ride sharing services that it might be necessary to track and trace a taxi or occupants should something go wrong. This may require a level of centralization to accomplish, giving users of the service a layer of security.
A ride sharing service based on the blockchain sure has its benefits, considering that Uber was hacked some time ago. Nevertheless, a company whose emphasis seems to be on driver benefit may not be exactly what the Industry needs. The Cryder ICO seems to do just that. There is a near hype of driver benefits to the extent of objecting the 50 percent revenue sharing formula of Uber and Lyft. The highlight was Cryder 80 percent sharing the formula with incentives all of which are driver focused.
What Cryder seems to have done is imitate what Uber and Lyft have already accomplished but with emphasis on driver benefit and availability while deemphasizing security while introducing decentralization of the services using blockchain. These are features that Uber and Lyft can implement without loss of core values beneficial to drivers and riders. Entry of Cryder as a service provider in the industry might just cause the established businesses to do just that.
