Industry Pain Point

Issues such as price discrimination and a lack of transparency in the distribution of benefits have made the shared economy market vulnerable to criticism. Many sharing economy models do not achieve a true sharing model. Due to the presence of third party agencies, most sharing economies behave more like access or rental economies.

Many sharing economy mechanisms are centralized and use undisclosed market mechanisms which leads to non-transparent distribution of benefits and price discrimination. The main goal of sharing economies is to share and utilize idle resources publicly. By not using these idle resources, we are forcing an unnecessary increase of supply to meet demand which leads to an enormous waste of resources.

The incentive mechanism for a true sharing economy should be open and transparent, and not altered arbitrarily. This will encourage participation and utilization of idle resources, ultimately paving the way for a greener society based on efficient use of finite resources.

Solution

IoT Chain (ITC) provides a decentralized resource sharing solution that supports peer-to-peer value exchange. In the IoT Chain solution, users can conduct free peer-to-peer transactions for their resources without a third party. This enables the sharing of physical and virtual assets such as cars, data, and idle computing resources. Agreements between users are solidified using the IoT Chain smart contract system.

The incentive mechanism in IoT Chain is open, transparent, and tamperproof because it is stored on the blockchain. IoT Chain preserves the incentive income of participating users, protecting value from bad actors and preventing others from changing the rules in the ecosystem. A counter-example of this is Didi, a popular ride-sharing service in China managed by a central authority that has changed policies without notice, robbing value contributors of the benefits they deserve.

Institutions and users alike can participate fairly in market transactions and data sharing. Through exclusive collections of distributed data, all circulating information such as profit distribution and transaction pricing is open, transparent, and traceable. Using the IoT Chain data classification solution, shared data can be purchased, accessed, and used through ITC token transactions after an encryption-based desensitization process.

Lastly, in current sharing economy models, smart devices are often owned by third parties while the data is generated by its users. IoT Chain helps users and agencies form agreements in advance on how data revenue is distributed, ensuring fair and transparent income distribution where users receive their fair share.