 What up, yo? It's the Daily Decrypt. Welcome to Currency Competition. I'm your host, Amanda, and today's episode is brought to you by Node 40. When we heard that there was a new mobile app coming out to compete with the likes of Uber and Lyft, that would also enable drivers to accept cryptocurrency for payment we had to find out more. Here is Christopher David from Arcade City. Well, Chris, tell us who you are. Give us some framing, and I have an inclination that your framing will have something to do with the term illegal Uber driver. Let's see. Yeah, I drove for Uber for a couple of months in late 2015, and let's see. Got into a couple tussles with the local law enforcement here in Portsmouth because the city council passed this law that basically made Uber illegal here, so I continued to drive and was very vocal about that. Got into some legal troubles and ended up starting this kind of activist campaign called Free Uber, where we organized about a bunch of different drivers and connected about 40 of them together in this Facebook group and did some various activism things together. In talking to these drivers, a number of them, they're big complained or were passionate about the government regulations side of things, but what I found was that even more of them were pissed off about the treatment of them by corporate Uber, feeling like they were not being listened to. I go to these driver meetings and just seeing the leadership just ignore really awesome ideas. I've just been turning over in my head the possibility of maybe making a decentralized version of Uber on the blockchain at some point. It got inspired to actually pull the trigger on this. When I saw a few days before New Year's Eve, one of the major taxi companies was threatening to pull their cabs out of Portsmouth to the neighboring town to protest the fact that the city council and the police were not cracking down enough on Uber drivers. I guess they wanted to see our drag out of our cars and beat to a pulp on the side of the road. I don't know. This would be an awesome time to organize some drivers together and give out a bunch of free rides. Yeah, why don't we just say that this is the soft launch for this new decentralized ride sharing service. Obviously, didn't have any of the code done or anything, but wanted to test out the basic idea of getting a bunch of drivers out on the road. Testing out a dispatch system, testing out the concept of giving free rides. We gave free rides because that led us to get around this ordinance. You did this. You already had a soft launch and this was on New Year's Eve. Yes. That got picked up by Associated Press and broadcasted out nationally. Just got a ton of coverage for that. We put up a website saying, okay, we're going to do an actual launch of the app on Valentine's Day, February 14th. We set a goal of recruiting 100 drivers by the end of January to help us test this out. We were planning to launch in Portsmouth and maybe a couple other cities around New Hampshire and maybe some cities outside of New Hampshire. We ended up signing up 100 drivers per day. We're at 1600 now. It's just blown up, absolutely massive. We have a lot of inbound interests from people who want to join the team. It's evolved into this much larger thing where it's like, oh crap, people actually expect us to compete with Uber now. Yes, let's figure out how to do that. Wow. Okay. So you have 1600 drivers in the queue and tell us the name of the app, Chris. Arcade City. Arcade City. You have 1600 interested drivers in the queue for Arcade City and you're planning to launch the downloadable mobile software this Valentine's Day. Now, tell us the cryptocurrency tie-in because the payment system here, the whole process, is very unique. Tell us how that works. Yes. So we're doing the bigger crypto integration starting in the spring. We're going to be integrating with the Ethereum blockchain. In the beginning, we're integrating payments with Stripe so people can pay in Bitcoin from day one if they want to. We are kind of just getting out the door with something very simple, just a basic app and Angular standard kind of app technologies tied to a database as usual with the intention of getting some funding or revenue that we can then hire some professional developers who can really look at the Ethereum integration and really plan out how to do that. But there have been other projects that have tried to solve this issue of how do you build ride sharing on the blockchain in some pretty cool attempts, but they didn't really have the growth hacking element of it down. We're just being able to put something out that can attract a crap ton of drivers and be able to articulate that rationale to those drivers of, hey, this actually should be a completely decentralized system and have people get that, but want some kind of specific things in the short term like the ability to set the road pricing. That's the big issue right now is that Uber has central management of pricing. So if you're driving 40 hours a week and that's feeding your family and that you come to rely on that and then overnight, which they did on January 8th, Uber cuts rates in like 100 cities up to 40% overnight with no warning. And now your pay cut is like, your take home pay is decimated. You have a lot of anger, a lot of anger by Uber and Lyft drivers, Lyft then follows suit after Uber, among drivers who are looking for an alternative, something that's not going to, number one, treat them like crap. And there's no really way to treat them like crap because we're decentralizing that pricing decision to the level of the driver and the customer. So pricing charge, whatever you want, and you can build up your own recurring customer base. So we've got kind of a combination of things that just people would like to see in terms of being able to be a little bit more of an entrepreneur and not be slave to Uber's whims while also like, Hey, this is actually a model that really works for the blockchain tech. You know, it would be nice to get this completely decentralized in the meantime, in the beginning, it won't be, but we're going to get there over the coming months. Okay. Wow. So that was so much information. Let me clarify a few points for myself. So A, the arcade city mobile app will be integrated with the payment processor Stripe. And you're telling me that Stripe natively accepts Bitcoin? Yeah. Just you flip it on. It's like a option that you can turn on optionally. But yeah, it's right. Stripe takes Bitcoin. Okay. And then with drivers and their individual riders being able to agree upon prices just for individual rides, is that something that can be agreed upon within the app? Like as the customer is ordering the ride, or is that agreed upon in person verbally? Or how do you imagine that might work? So there's there's two kind of payment modes. There's going to be peer-to-peer mode and then there's going to be gamified mode. So peer-to-peer is people can use this app just as kind of a communications platform to connect rider to driver. There's going to be a rating system. Like basically just like send a message like I'm interested in a ride. Are you interested in giving me one? Yep. Okay. Pretty much. And yeah, there will be a rating system and you know, a little vet that drivers have, you know, passive background check, just some basic kind of checks. You know, right now we're only allowing Uber and Lyft drivers onto the platform because we know that they've been through a background check process. We don't have the money for our own type things. So that'll be like a little thing on their driver profile. Hey, you know, they passed through this process. So there's going to be certain like, you know, vetting things, but drivers are going to have a profile. And when a rider goes into, let's say they want to do a pre-scheduled ride and they want someone to take them to the airport three days from now, they'll put in a ride request and then it'll match that to the availability of the drivers and it'll say, hey, there's four drivers who are able to take you. Two of them are compliant with all laws and regulations and they have commercial insurance. Two of them are more bandit cabs and they are a little bit more off the grid type thing and you can talk with them directly if you're comfortable doing that. They might charge a little less or something like that, but we're letting people actually like make their own decisions about what their comfort level is. So yeah, they can send the driver and they can either, if the driver wants to say, look, you know, you, I take credit card payments through the app or I don't, they can do that. They can trade in, and if they want to trade in Dogecoin, because that's a thing in New Hampshire or wherever they can do that, we don't care. So in peer to peer mode, people can just transact directly and we don't know what goes on and we don't care. Obviously, we don't get a piece of that. Oh well. But then there's kind of the gamified rise or payment through the app. So if someone wants to connect their credit card and pay to the app because it's going to be probably a little bit more secure or safe than necessarily trusting the driver to handle that, then we're going to take the 10% fee, 90% goes to the driver. So for a launch, it's going to be pretty basic about, like, you know, you put in a ride request, you get matched with a driver, but later on, we want to offer drivers the ability to like set their own pricing tiers, like their own, like, you know, taxis have the like the rate card where it's like, you know, the first X percentage of the mile goes like this, this, this, this, this. You know, if drivers have said they want the ability to like tack on surcharges if it's raining outside or if they make like a stop. So the idea is for the passenger to be able to put in what their, you know, the route is like, Hey, I want to go here, you know, that's going to take five minutes and then go here and then have it run that route through the pricing algorithm of all the available drivers. So you can see, Oh, this driver who's a level 10, you know, livery will do it for $50. This driver who is a level six, you know, a Goracab will do it for $30. But hey, he's got, you know, a bunch of five star reviews and people like him, you know, I feel good about trusting that, that person. So there'll be different tiers of this will all be transparent to the rider. My goodness. And now will both an Android and iOS arcade city app be available for this soft launch on, on Valentine's Day? Yeah. Yeah. We're coding this in Angular and Ionic. So we just, you know, one set of code that we then deploy to the different platforms. Okay. So I imagine that people like, uh, namely me are completely salivating over this idea of being able to use this app to actually get a ride somewhere and pay not only maybe in Bitcoin, but perhaps whatever form of payments the individual driver agrees to take. Is there a way that I can find out if arcade city drivers are available where I am at any given time, like on Valentine's Day and thereafter? Yeah. So when you download the app, you will see when you log in, it'll like tell where your location is. And it'll say, you know, there's 10 drivers in your area. Um, some dry, now some drivers will be like, they'll be in the system and there could be a driver who lives, you know, like, you know, half a mile away from you and will say, Hey, you know, there's, there's a driver close, but they're not online right now, but you can message them or if they're drivers who are online and you can then, you know, those are going to be people that if you want an instant ride that they'll be able to take you. Now in the beginning for the launch where we are more emphasizing the pre-scheduled rides because the live real-time hailing that requires a little bit more of a, you know, balance of supply and demand that might take a while to emerge based on the level of drivers kind of signing up and some drivers really taking the initiative and recruiting other drivers in their areas. I mean, there's some cities Fresno, California, I mean, there's like 70 drivers there. So live real-time hailing might work from day one there. But you know, we have, you know, a couple people who've like taken a lot of initiative. Someone already hosted a meetup of drivers in Fresno, California, like last week and like three drivers came like we haven't even launched the thing yet. We're not paying any of these people. So it's awesome to see all this like decentralized just people taking initiative. But let's say there's no drivers in your area. Let's say you live out in the boonies or something, but you know, people generally around you might be interested if they knew about this. You'll have a referral link that if you want to click in the app to share that on Facebook, anyone who signs up through your link, you're going to get 3%, not 3%. You're going to get a little percent, maybe one to two and a half, one to two percent. We're still working on the numbers. You're going to get a percentage of every ride they ever give forever, the gamified rides with payment through the app. So we have driver and rider referral percentage. That's partly how we've been able to grow so fast. It's like, hey, like not, we don't have this crappy referral program where Uber like gives you $50 after they take 30 rides or something like that. Like we have no, none of the margins, we have none of the overhead that Uber does. We can afford to pass that on to incentivize the growth of the network. Well, I have nothing to say. I mean, this is just, this is so innovative and exciting. And so I, I guess I would ask you, do you have any final comments? You know, people ask why the name Arcade City? I wanted to call this Agora or Agora City, but there's a dark. What's Agora? What's that? It's a marketplace, you know, in ancient Greece, it's where people came to apply their wares. And it was at least my understanding of it. Not, you know, there weren't any like Athenian government people will like coordinating it. So just with people where people traded. So I like that idea because what we're doing here beyond just the ride sharing, if you're creating a profile that says that you're willing to take a person from point A to point B, you know, here's how you communicate. There's nothing stopping you on your driver profile from saying that you're also willing to do deliveries, or that you're also willing to go shovel out someone's driveway. You can list all that stuff on your profile. And if the user wants to reserve you through that same system to do that, they're more than welcome to. So the longer term vision of this is to build like a marketplace where people can just transact with each other. Eventually, this will be all on the blockchain and we'll figure out all the, you know, identity stuff and reputation. So people feel good about using this. So I love the concept of an Agora, but there's this dark web, like popular drug trading app that does drugs and just that kind. So I didn't want to use the word Agora because it's kind of been taken. So I threw Agora into a Thesaurus and the first word that came up was arcade. I'm like, oh yeah, arcade. There's like the arches, but there's like a trading ground. And I was like, well, I like the word arcade also because it implies like games and gamification and fun. And we're having like these little like levels where if you're like a driver and you get good reviews, you kind of level up and you can unlock stuff. So we're going to work on like integrating games and fun things. Like maybe there'll be some game people can play in the backseat. I don't know. So I love the name arcade city. It just sounds like fun and it is fun. So that's kind of the explanation of the name and where we're taking this. Wow. All right. Well, I imagine there will be a lot of people who will be interested to know a little bit more or potentially a lot more. So tell people where they can find you and certainly tell people how they can find out if they can take or offer rides starting February 14th, 2016. Yeah. So the best thing to do is to follow us on Facebook. We posed a lot of updates and crap talk about Uber and fun jokes on a Facebook page. So that's the best way to get a hold of us. You can check out our website arcade.city. I mean, the website right now is like a piece of crap that I threw up in a couple hours. And it's miraculous that we've even had so many people sign up despite that. But we're going to have a new website coming out in a few days. It'll be at arcade.city. And yeah, if you want to get involved, shoot us a message through the Facebook page. We'll connect you in. We have a Facebook group of a thousand people where we're planning stuff. We've got a Slack channel, all that stuff. So if you want to help us build this, we're still looking for a couple of developers and people who can help out. So yeah, hit us up. And Chris, are you going to be driving? Are you going to be giving rides on February 14th and for arcade city in general? Yes. Yeah. I'm going to stay active, driving. You know, that's kind of the best way to get, you know, feedback and see how people are experiencing is to kind of be on the front lines of it. So yes, definitely. All right. Well, right on. Well, thank you so much for your time, Chris. And I hope to check back in with you after, after arcade city is seeing some action and maybe get a progress report. Okay, right on. Today's episode is brought to you by Node 40, which is a hosting provider for anybody who runs a masternode in Dash. In addition to acting as a virtual private server, Node 40 also enables those with masternodes to vote on budgetary propositions. 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