There is a growing demand for the city information in the hands of locals. Cool Cousin lets travelers access it with ease, and helps locals to profit from it.

Imagine two people walking down the same street—whether it’s Bushwick Ave in Williamsburg or Alexander Platz in Berlin; one of them is a tourist and the other a local. We can probably agree that on a fundamental level they experience very different cities.

Tourists don’t recognize traps that locals see from a mile away, and, contrarily, they won’t recognize gems that hide behind unapealing facades. Tourists have a clean slate and locals come with baggage of experience—good and bad—that helps them filter all the information. They learned by trial and error the best way to go to work, which coffee place is best for studying, and where to get the really good Ramen. They love their go-to local spots and enjoy telling their networks about their way of exploring the city.

Do you know how many recommendations, reviews, blogs, articles and city guides a tourist would have to read and sort through to know what a local knows by simply living in the city, trying things out and soaking things in? A lot. And still then, they’ll have to sort through fake and unsuitable information.

Cool Cousin changes all this for good. We know that many locals have a passion for their city and plenty of really valuable knowledge they’ve procured over time, while many travelers want to experience the city from a local’s perspective, and don’t know how.

Economists have a name for this, it’s called a “missing market”.

There are plenty of examples for this. Most user-generated companies have benefited from spotting these markets before everyone else. Airbnb doesn’t own the 4 million houses that they have on the market, and Uber doesn’t own the 7 million cars that offer their transportation service. In the very same way, Cool Cousin doesn’t own the really valuable city knowledge that we have on the market. Our local Cousins do. We’re just getting them to see it, make it and share it.

This new allocation of goods can also be referred to as a “pareto improvement”, which is basically a fancy term for win-win. A pareto improvement means that by building a new market, we can create economic benefits for many individuals without making someone worse off. This happens if one or more individuals already have this asset - in our case INFORMATION - and with the right market, it can generate value and income without harming somebody else.

Airbnb and Uber understood that there are a lot of houses that can be rented for a short period of time and there are a ton of cars already on the road that can reduce the cost of transportation.

There is, concurrently, a lot of city information sitting in the hands of the locals.

What Cool Cousin is doing is giving Cousins (locals) the chance to benefit from the vast amount of information that they already have. So yeah, Cool Cousin is here to change the travel game - by building a new marketplace of local knowledge.

So why are we doing it with a crypto token?

BeCUZ ( ;) ), now we have a currency whose price is positively correlated with the quality of the product. If the Cousin adds new good content, they will be rewarded and the product improves, which makes it more valuable.

As the common people that we are, we cannot impact the worth of, lets say, the US dollar. The US dollar changes due to actions executed by the middleman, such as the Federal Bank and corporations with a lot of power (governments included). Small actions and transactions do not affect it. However, as active members in this growing community, we can impact it, but making the entire ecosystem better.

CUZ allows us to empower locals and travelers to build their own new market. Using blockchain technology, we are giving an incentive to Cousins to create and share their knowledge and get real value for their information.

Each CUZ holder becomes an active member in the market who will benefit from improving the product and the community and will have the power to do so. This means that as Cousins you can create a better product by contributing your new recommendations and tips, and as travelers to use the token and spread the word.

The more people join the community and take part in it, as Cousins or travelers, the stronger the economy becomes. And it’s all up to them (no, this is not an inspirational speech. It’s really how this works!).

This market we are building has a very simple logic to it: take information that locals have and use only to serve themselves, and the estimated 1.2 billion tourists each year worldwide, and create a token that has real value based on those two ingredients.

We don’t know what the future holds (that could be cool, but we are not there yet), but we are excited just imaging what value travelers and Cousins can get. We provide the platform, the token, and the idea that each of us can find a local who has the information we are looking for. Now, we just need to let the (new) market do its thang.

*With a background as a satellite operator in the intelligence force of the IDF, Ofer has years of experience in making things work. Today, he is a computer science and economics student who is the rising star of Cool Cousin’s backend development.

**