Feasibility study and prototyping of a blockchain-based transport service pricing and allocation platform : final report

This report summarises the activity and findings of the JRC Proof of Concept Project Ridechain. The project investigated the applicability and market potential of blockchain technology for asset sharing in the road transport sector. The project comprised two principal activities. The first activity was market research and analysis to support the development of a new service concept and business model for blockchain-powered shared mobility. Specifically, the research resulted in the definition of a novel technology platform that leverages blockchain, cloud services, and in-car technology to enhance trust, streamline coordination and improve information exchange in P2P car sharing ecosystems. The second activity was technology prototyping to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the novel service concept using state of the art blockchain and IoT frameworks. These two activities provided answers to two respective research questions. First, what would be a high-value transport sector market to which a blockchain-powered technology product could offer a high-value solution? Second, how could this technology product be realised? The report starts with an introduction to distributed ledger technologies and applications of blockchain in transport and presents a brief overview of innovative business models in goods and passenger transport. The report continues with an outline of the agile product discovery methodology followed throughout the project, which emphasises experiment-driven validation in order to minimise risks relating to customer value, technical feasibility and financial viability. Next, the report presents the market analysis and research results derived through the application of this methodology. It discusses different transport service markets and their respective growth characteristics and examines a selection of the most promising service models from the perspective of the value that blockchain technology has to offer. Decentralised car sharing is singled out as a high-value market of high growth potential in the wider sector of shared mobility. The report continues with competition analysis relevant to the identified market and proceeds with analysis of alternative business models for consumer to consumer and business to business car sharing captured with a Business Model Canvas. The assumptions underlying the business value ideation are identified and characterised with respect to impact and uncertainty, leading to the design of a series of market validation experiments. These experiments are presented along with the data obtained from 11 semi-structured qualitative interviews and answers collected from 254 online survey participants. The report comes to a close with an overview of the conceptual architecture of the developed service concept and a description of the steps taken to demonstrate its technical feasibility.