[English] Decentralization of the sharing economy using blockchain technology

This is a field I’m personally quite interested in. There are also examples that are easy to explain.

As mentioned in the main text, ride-hailingUberand home sharingAirbnbare well known, but by applying blockchain technology, you could simply connect providers and users without intermediaries, removing the middlemen from such services.

In Japan, Uber has sometimes been considered illegal as “hara-kata” (illegal taxi service). It seems that in some parts of Tokyo the original advantages cannot be fully utilized, but it appears they are still operating anyway.

The Uber pilot started in Fukuoka in 2015 was ordered to cease by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, and due to the fierce opposition from the taxi industry, Toyama Prefecture, which was scheduled to launch in 2016, canceled because of that pressure. What a pity lol

This reminds me of Slock.it, which started The DAO—an early decentralized fund (now extinct). They proposed a bicycle-sharing system as a pioneer: users who want to share a bicycle would search for a docked bicycle on a map, and once a deposit transaction went through, the lock would release and they could ride it; after use, they could leave it anywhere, lock it, and a portion of the deposit would be returned...

This time, it’s about translating into Japanese an article about a startup developing a protocol that connects users and providers of sharing services by turning the sharing economy into a decentralized platform.