MVL CEO Kay Woo had an interview at Money FM 893, The Curve on August 2nd.
Interviewer’s Introduction of TADA, a Ride-hailing Service of MVL:
TADA is based on blockchain, and charges driver zero commission.
MVL connects various stakeholders within the vehicle-related industry, such as drivers, riders, repair service providers, retailers, automobile manufacturers, automobile-insurance companies.
Entire history of vehicle is tracked, stored, and readily available to the parties in the ecosystem.
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Q. What are the pain points you want to address of this industry?
Drivers have had severe problem sustaining their lives caused by low income, which became even worse after the consolidation of the two giants early this year. Consequently this led to low quality of the service. This was one of the main problem MVL wanted to solve.
Q. How blockchain is implemented in TADA?
When we explain TADA, we actually don’t even go further to explain blockchain. Blockchain is just a supporting layer. Imagine when Cloud Service was first introduced, everyone thrilled and talked about it. But now you use every service above Cloud, but no one even cares. Cloud was one of astounding, technological progress, and we believe blockchain is also a revolutionary technological progress. Blockchain could be a business model that we could use, when used properly with token economy.
At the beginning stage one cannot use MVL token as a payment. People now pay with cash or credit card like other platforms. We do not want to scare people with cryptocurrency, since for now people are not familiar with cryptocurrency and drivers get worried if they not get paid by real money. Plus we do not want the price to be super-low, we want it to be stable to not hurt the income of the drivers.
Cryptocurrency, and token economy is rather implemented within the incentive side. As drivers and riders use TADA service, they are contributing data, such as driving behaviors or service reviews, and participating in MVL. For instance, when drivers drive safely and get good reviews by providing good service to riders they get points, and those points could be exchanged to tokens. These tokens could be saved in their wallet and will be their financial asset later. Riders could also get points through leaving reviews.
Q. How do you run a non-profit business model?
Think of a traditional business model. One must think about profit margin, and 20~30% commission fee would be the major revenue source for the company.
But as a blockchain project, we have a different approach. TADA does not charge any commission to drivers. We only impose the transaction fee of all credit card payments that we pay to payment gateway, for the maintenance of TADA. As the volume of the service goes up, we can even negotiate with them to lower it.
We have started with fund, ICO, and got funded from general public. We use this fund to sustain our business. We also have produced the crypto currency, MVL token, and we might use this cryptocurrency as an operational expense later stage when we need, but this would be at least 2 years from now.
Q. What makes TADA special from other platforms?
What differentiates TADA, and basically MVL, most from other companies is that we do not own the data. The actual data contributors, such as drivers and riders, they are the owners of their data. Without consent, we cannot utilize the data.
We are not competing with other giants that are already providing service in this market. We aim to bring the social impact here. We want to deliver the proper message that the MVL participants are receiving fair compensation for their work.
Q. You are South Korean, but how come you have launched TADA in Singapore?
As a businessman, I had many chances to look for the opportunities all around the world. We thought Singapore has the perfect size of market, and it was the perfect timing and location to solve current problem here. We wanted to prove our business works, and gratefully it’s working out now 🙂
TADA is not available in Korea for now, we are hopefully seeking the launch next year, after making history in here, at Singapore.