Blockchain startup DOVU has announced that it has successfully completed the first pilot with BMW and Alphabet.
The pilot involved tracking mileage in leased vehicles, CoinDesk reported. In a blog post, DOVU explained that the objective was to maintain the residual values of the vehicles that come back to the market after a lease or fleet assignment.
The return value of a vehicle is most influenced by its mileage. The existing system uses fuel card to track vehicle mileage across fleets inside BMW. However, due to a number of reasons such as mistyped numbers, oversight, or lack of time, the data is highly inconsistent.
To solve these challenges, DOVU proposed using tokens to influence behaviour or gain access to data. In particular, it decided on a “manual approach” to track mileage in return for some token-based rewards.
“Our DOVU wallet is built to be extensible, providing an interface to any number of data collection or behavioural activities,” DOVU said. “So adding in a manual data collection method to trigger a reward was relatively straightforward.”
The wallet app prompted users to use their phone camera to take a snapshot of their dashboard at a specific time. Further, using OCR and machine learning, the numerics on the dash were identified and converted into an integer which was verified and recorded on the blockchain. Smart contracts checked if the conditions were met. Users confirmed the correct figure before submitting and received 1DOV for each submission.
“By the end of the initial ten week programme we had produced a custom wallet for BMW, co-branded with the Alphabet visual branding. The app was distributed internally via our enterprise accounts with versions available for iOS and Android users and the pilot continues to run so we can keep measuring how tokenisation can encourage people to carry out certain tasks or influence their behavior,” DOVU added.
