What is the New Economy of Movement? 

Since the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1908, the mobility landscape has been dominated by private ownership and the internal combustion engine. This undoubtedly led to improvements in living standards, lifestyles, and opportunities unimaginable to the average person at the dawn of the twentieth century; unfortunately, it also led to pollution, congestion, global warming, and other ills that challenge us today. 

The New Economy of Movement (NEM) will be defined by smart and decentralized mobility services enabled by the rapid rise of technologies like blockchain, AI, and IoT. In addition, the NEM will unleash new opportunities to monetize infrastructure, vehicles, services, and connected data; enable a less centralized transportation ecosystem, allow for supply chain transparency, and create new usage-based mobility service models. 

What is MOBI?

Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) is a global nonprofit smart mobility consortium. MOBI and its members are creating blockchain-based standards to identify vehicles, people, businesses, and MOBI Trusted Trip, with the goal of making transportation more efficient, equitable, decentralized, and sustainable. MOBI officially launched in May 2018 and released its first standard, Vehicle Identity (MOBI VID), which leverages internationally accepted vehicle identification number (VIN) to define a vehicle’s digital twin, the following year. Since its launch, MOBI has formed seven working groups, released 13 standards, and launched several initiatives surrounding the MOBI Technology Stack. 

MOBI is building the Web3 Digital Infrastructure for the New Economy of Movement with the MOBI Technology Stack

Before the adoption of any revolutionary technology, industries need standards and specifications to build the foundational infrastructure that enables products and services to communicate and work together. The World Wide Web, ubiquitous as it is today, began as a series of data internetworking standards in the 1970s. 

However, standards alone are not sufficient for the adoption of new and disruptive technologies. These standards need to be tested and implemented within a Minimum Viable Community in order to scale. To this end, MOBI launched two new digital infrastructure initiatives: mobiNET and Citopia. Together with the MOBI consortium, the new initiatives form what we refer to as the MOBI Technology Stack, or MTS. The MTS comprises the foundational technologies needed to verify decentralized transactions between connected entities. Each layer provides a different architecture and function, together forming a holistic approach to Web3 applications for the connected ecosystem. 

• The Foundational Layer, the MOBI consortium, creates standards to identify connected entities and shared business processes 
• The Middle Layer, mobiNET, is a layer-two, protocol-agnostic digital infrastructure to provide trusted identity services
• The Top Layer, Citopia, is a trustless decentralized platform to onboard DIDs and enable Verifiable Credential (VC) issuance for business automation; monetizing assets such as infrastructure, services, and data.

Decentralized transactions in the New Economy of Movement must be supported by a new type of digital identity, one which is machine-readable, self-sovereign, and uses blockchain as a trust anchor to link such entities to relevant attributes, characteristics, and capabilities. These new digital identities are known as Decentralized Identifiers, or DIDs.  

MOBI launched the DRIVES (Distributed Registry for Intelligent Vehicle Ecosystem Sustainability) Program in early 2021 to demonstrate how DIDs can automate transactions within extended multi-party value chains in a decentralized ecosystem. 

Members of the DRIVES Program produced the MOBI Trusted Trip (MTT) standard over several months and published it in October 2021. MTT leverages MOBI VID and other existing standards together with mobiNET core services to link the verifiable trusted identity, or DID, of any entity with their timestamped locations into a verifiable trip to enable marginal cost pricing for many new classes of mobility transactions. Citopia is the decentralized platform that enables users and providers to manage their own MTTs and transactions while retaining data privacy.

MOBI completed its first Trusted Trip demo in October 2021. Our ongoing and future demos and pilots will bring the MOBI Technology Stack to scale and unlock countless opportunities in the connected and decentralized mobility ecosystem. 

Connected and Decentralized Mobility

Today, there are nearly 15 billion connected vehicles and things in use worldwide. By 2025, that number is expected to grow to 31 billion. The market for connected sensors alone is expected to be more than $30 billion by 2026. 

Connected vehicles and devices produce and manage real-time data, which is used to unlock a vast array of smart applications and new revenue opportunities. This data offers powerful insights about usage-based mobility services and the movement of goods around the globe, enabling the automation of more efficient and sustainable business processes.

The convergence of technologies such as AI and Blockchain gives connected vehicles and devices trusted digital identities and intelligence in order to autonomously participate as independent economic agents in transactions. As the number of connected devices grows exponentially, these transactions will create the multi-trillion-dollar New Economy of Movement.

Knowing that trusted identities are necessary to support these decentralized transactions, MOBI members developed mobiNET, a layer-two, protocol-agnostic digital infrastructure to provide trusted identity services.

At its core, mobiNET is about joint value creation. Together with other consortia, mobiNET will evolve into the Integrated Trust Network, or ITN. Adjacent ecosystem collaboration is about economy of scale, providing value, trust, efficiency, and new business models for all participating consortia trust domains.

Connected Mobility Needs a Decentralized Platform for Seamless Movement

At the top of the MTS is Citopia, a decentralized platform and tokenized ecosystem for business automation where mobility stakeholders can securely meet, message, and transact. Citopia facilitates the onboarding of DIDs and issuance of VCs for automating decentralized transactions to create the seamless, secure, and private mobility experience that users demand.  

In a decentralized system, DIDs are embedded in VCs. Those VCs may be created by trusted entities, such as government agencies, businesses, universities, or employers and issued to a “holder” of the VC. If we think of the DID as a global ID, then VCs are like digital passports, or unique stamps which serve to attest to specific information about an entity associated with a specific DID.

Watch this video to learn more about how Citopia works. 

Citopia enables countless track and trace use cases in the supply chain and unlocks marginal cost pricing for numerous mobility-as-a-service transactions, including urban road tolling, meter-free parking, congestion management, usage-based insurance, and many more. 

Unlike other map-based mobility apps, the Citopia platform does not store user data. However, users can choose to share their data for rewards and incentives. In this way, it not only protects data privacy — it gives users control over their own information and how that information is used.  

Together, Citopia and mobiNET form the foundation of the New Economy of Movement, enabling many decentralized business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and peer-to-peer (P2P) use cases and serving as the shared Web3 infrastructure that brings all entities in the connected ecosystem together on one technology stack.

Let’s Build the New Economy of Movement Together!

Building a truly sustainable, democratized, and decentralized New Economy of Movement requires collaboration between public and private stakeholders across the globe. A new age of digital transformation beckons; it’s crucial that we move forward with a shared understanding of the resources at our disposal and work together to maximize our efforts and abilities. 

Click here to join our ever-growing community and help Build the New Economy of Movement.