The Coin of Transportation

DAV is an open source Software platform that allows anyone to buy or sell transportation services in a decentralized market. DAV integrates into any vehicle (car, drone, ship), enabling those vehicles to discover, communicate, and transact with one another. This shapes a decentralized manned transportation network today and is the underlying infrastructure for an autonomous transportation network tomorrow. DAV accomplishes this through the DAV protocol which connects vehicles, users, and service providers all on one network.

DAV takes the P2P information transfer capabilities of the internet and the P2P value transfer made possible by the blockchain (in this case, via the DAV token) and brings them to their next logical conclusion, enabling P2P transfer of physical goods. Consider this scenario: a package needs to be delivered using a drone. The parties involved include a sender, recipient, drone operator, goods insurer, and arbitrator. The blockchain, and specifically smart contracts, enable us to conduct these kinds of transactions P2P, directly between these parties, without needing an intermediary, thus reducing costs to all parties while providing them with the assurance they need to conduct business without necessarily trusting each other beforehand.

Today our protocol creates a decentralized internet of transportation with the manned vehicles on the road and in the air that we see today. We’ve built the underlying infrastructure that allows these vehicles to discover, communicate, and transact with each other utilizing the blockchain technology.

This same infrastructure will allow autonomous vehicles to discover, communicate, and transact with each other. Although autonomous cars and trucks have not yet achieved mainstream adoption, the world is awash in innovation in autonomous drones. Companies large and small are popping up around the world offering autonomous drone services to industry and the public. Look up what Amazon is doing, or 7-Eleven, or Flytrex and you will see solid evidence that autonomous drones have arrived and are rushing in to fill a massive service void.

Utilizing our protocol with autonomous vehicles, DAV will first focus the technology on the drone and rover market which is right on the cusp of mainstream adoption. Autonomous cars, buses, trucks and marine vehicles will be addressed in due course.

DAV tokens are essential for a truly decentralized transportation marketplace. The DAV token is needed for users to participate in the innovative DAV platform. Today vehicle owners and service providers who see the value of a decentralized transportation ecosystem will benefit from historically low barriers to market entry (enabled by the DAV platform), along with operational optimization. The same goes for AV owners once more AV's hit the market in the coming years.

We are working on this on more than one level. First, we have software that can reside outside of the vehicle (i.e., either on a remote server, or onboard an aftermarket component attached to the vehicle). This software can speak with the vehicle using its existing APIs to give it commands, receive telemetry data, and more. We are already working with a number of vehicle manufacturers (both manned and autonomous) this way, both integrating with their existing APIs, and working with them to open new API capabilities. Second, there are common standards emerging for vehicles that will allow the addition of external ""apps"" to the vehicle's IVI (with appropriate permissions, of course). We are in touch with someone who has been doing a lot of great work on this over at Automotive Grade Linux, and we are looking into that as well. Finally, we will be working with manufacturers to integrate DAV technology directly into their vehicles. This will happen at a later stage, but we are already in talks with a few companies about this at the moment. To make this possible, we are creating developer tools and SDKs for different programming languages and platforms. These tools ease third-party development and allow our partners to focus on their core business by abstracting a lot of the complexities of working with blockchain, doing decentralized communications, etc.

DAV is built on the Ethereum Blockchain.

We are looking at various approaches to improve transaction times and lower fees (which is critical for micropayments), including using side chains, but we have not announced anything yet. We are also in discussions with several partners who can solve for any scalability issues. We chose the Ethereum platform because it has by far the greatest concentration of developer talent working on it in the blockchain space. The core development team at the Ethereum Foundation is heavily supported by game theorists and formal verification experts, and they have ample funding. To top that off, the commercial and industrial interests that have aligned with the Ethereum blockchain are global heavyweights: Cisco, Deloitte, Intel, Mastercard, Pfizer, Credit Suisse…just to name a few. With that kind of backing and interest, we feel Ethereum is currently the protocol with the greatest chance for global adoption at this time. To address your concerns about transaction speed and congestion, we’d like to highlight that we need to be looking at potential rather than current status. We all recognize that it is still early days for blockchain technology, and thus the foundations are currently being built for future use. Vitalik Buterin recently said, “I expect 2018, at least within the Ethereum space that I’m best able to speak about, will be the year of action. It will be the year where all of the ideas around scalability, Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy that we have painstakingly worked on and refined over the last four years are finally going to turn into real, live working code that you can play around in a highly mature form in some cases on testnets, and in some key cases even on the public mainnet. Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver.” Having said all that, our gifted CTO and CEO are both accomplished technologists who keep a close watch on the broader ecosystem, and should another platform make a better case for the success of DAV, migration would be an option.

DAV's team consists of successful entreprenuers, innovators, blockchain experts, and autonomous vehicle specialists. Our team, together with our advisors, partners, and community, are building the future of transporation together. You can learn more about who we are in our Team section.

DAV is a registered non-profit foundation in Treforma AG, Grabenstrasse 25 6340 Baar, Zug, Switzerland. The team is located in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Switzerland.

11 June, 2018 to 25 June, 2018. Our token sale was restricted for persons from certain jurisdictions including the US or China.