Drife is a decentralized ride-hailing platform which will connect drivers and riders through a mobile application. The platform deals with a whole new economic model that can incentivize all the value creators fairly and curb the existent intermediaries.
Ride-hailing platform works on a very broke business model of monetizing and prioritizing profit over its drivers, riders and people at large. Some major issues they face include sky-rocketing commissions that lead to unsustainable driver incomes, price manipulation and unjustified price surges, lack of loyalty and sustained incentivisation, and other centralization centric problems.
The nature of the problem we’re trying to solve requires the underlying blockchain infrastructure to be extremely scalable and fast. A ride-hailing platform is required to clock a high transaction throughput and bandwidth so as to ensure that the platform users are not faced with any latency while availing services. The platform also requires geo-location and geospatial distance data from the external world within the walled garden of a blockchain for the allocation of rides and computation of ride fare prices.
The Æternity blockchain is an Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform that has been redesigned at the protocol level to address some of the most fundamental challenges native to preceding blockchains.
The following are some major technical advantages provided by æternity that stand out for us at Drife as against the other blockchain protocols existing currently in the market.
● Oracles are fundamental to any fully functional decentralized platform that wants to fetch data from the external world. Æternity acknowledges this requirement and integrates oracle services as a part of æternity’s core blockchain protocol. Drife piggybacks on this oracle service integrated at layer 1 to save on efforts and cost of integrating a third-party oracle like Oraclize or ChainLink.
● Æternity runs on the super cool Bitcoin-NG Consensus Algorithm which is the evolved version of the Bitcoin protocol. It still uses Nakamoto consensus but separates leader election and block production by introducing two kinds of blocks called key and micro blocks. Splitting up leader election and block production allows a leader to produce micro blocks in rapid succession, increasing the transaction throughput significantly.
● Unlimited scaling is possible with lightweight and trustless off-chain state channels that are built into æternity’s first layer itself. The state-channels provide support for smart contracts and enable inexpensive private transactions through them.
● FATE or the Fast Æternity Transaction Engine is a type-safe Virtual Machine optimized for æternity smart contracts that are written in a specialised strongly-typed functional programming language called Sophia. This powerful Virtual Machine outperforms other blockchain networks with better efficiency and by providing a safer environment, giving developers the advantage of speed, safety and low fees, even when scaling quickly.
● Erlang, a functional programming language designed especially for scalable, global networks seems to be perfect for developing blockchains.
Æternity is however not just great tech, but also boasts a fabulous community with developers that are distributed across the globe and yet, highly available on dev forums and telegram.
And that’s why we at Drife are on Æternity, till eternity and beyond.
DRIFE Team