oBike users can soon pay for rides using cryptocurrency

The bike-sharing company has teamed up with Chinese blockchain company TRON to develop its own cryptocurrency

Singapore’s bike-sharing startup oBike has teamed up with Chinese blockchain company TRON to launch its own cryptocurrency, called oCoins, built on the latter’s blockchain protocol.

It is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2018.

oBike users can earn oCoins while riding on the oBikes. They will then be able to use these coins to pay for future rides and top up their oBike wallets.

In addition, they can use oCoins to purchase online content from applications built on the TRON platform. These include audio content community Peiwo and live-streaming app Uplive.

The TRON protocol is built for content creators who wish to develop, store and publish content on a decentralised ecosystem (for the purpose of keeping content secure).

It has its own cryptocurrency called TRONIX, or TRX for short, which is ranked number 18 worldwide in the list of cryptocurrencies. TRX has a market capacity of US$2.6 billion.

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TRON’s founder, Justin Sun, is the former Chief Representative of Ripple in Greater China and the CEO of Peiwo. He also made the Forbes 30 under 30 list twice.

“As a tech company, we are dedicated to bringing better value and benefits to our users through constant innovation and mutually beneficial partnerships. We are confident that the introduction of oCoins, will be an attractive proposition for users to continue riding oBike in more ways than one,” Edward Chen, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of oBike.

With oBike’s base of 10 million users across 20 countries, the collaboration may see TRON’s community of apps gain an uptick in transactions, should oBike’s users warm to the oCoins.

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Image Credit: oBike

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