Car-sharing service tokenizes Teslas to share revenue
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
A little car-sharing service in Vienna, Austria, announced that it had tokenized part of its fleet of over 200 Tesla cars.
Why it matters: By tokenizing ownership of the fleet, the firm can distribute revenue to the co-owners as it comes in, providing real revenue to a blockchain token.
Details: The offering, from six-year-old Eloop, is built on the Polkadot smart-contract blockchain using a system set up by the firm Peaq.
What they're saying: “For web3 to go mainstream, we need a connection between the digital and real worlds, which enable people to co-own assets that generate revenue based on actual services and goods,” Leonard Dorloechter, the co-founder of Peaq, told Cointelegraph.
How it works: Each car has its own individual identity via Peaq's technology, but the ownership share covers all the tokenized cars in the fleet.
- Each investor owns a share in that fleet proportional to what they put in.
Zoom in: According to Eloop's website, 23 Teslas have been tokenized, but they talk about more in media accounts.
- Users buy the tokens, sign an ownership agreement and then share any revenues above operational costs with Eloop. Revenue is split 50/50.
- Eloop estimates in its whitepaper that it costs about 550€ to operate one car for a month.
Users can cash out in fiat any time they have more than 10€ in their account, or they can apply their balance to Eloop credits (that is, free rides). Credits work out to about 50% better, according to the whitepaper.
- Eloop didn't respond to a request for comment from Axios about how much tokens cost or how much its holders are earning so far.
Of note: While it is a token, it's a security token and is only transferrable to whitelisted wallets (that is, wallets that have gone through an anti-money laundering process).
Zoom out: Europe is likely to see more adventurous experiments in tokenization, now that startups there have regulatory clarity around what they can and can't do.
The gist: “We call it car sharing 2.0 because the community who owns the cars also rents them out," Eloop CEO Nico Prugger told Cointelegraph.
