At the outset of MobiFi's journey, our mission was to craft a unique Decentralized Finance (DeFi) solution designed specifically for the mobility industry. Our vision was to leverage unused capital from transport cards, integrating it into a DeFi protocol, thus enabling users to earn extra income during periods of non-utilization. However, the adoption of such an advanced concept was thwarted by the current real-world readiness and regulatory environment, posing considerable challenges in offering DeFi services.
At MobiFi, we fundamentally believe that cryptocurrency will only become universally accepted when it finds applicability in practical, real-life scenarios, beyond the traditional boundaries of trading or investment. A prime example would be the commonplace act of paying for a mobility service in real life, with cryptocurrency.
Our unwavering goal to revolutionize travel, making it more affordable, enjoyable, and sustainable, has remained the constant driving force behind our efforts. To accelerate our journey in this rapidly-evolving industry, we adopted a strategy to "think big, start small", a decision that led us to forge our path in the parking industry. We established partnerships with local government bodies and businesses in the Netherlands, and we have successfully introduced our product to thousands of users. With a growing footprint in both the Netherlands and Belgium, it's particularly encouraging to witness non-crypto users receiving NFTs and token rewards, using them to pay for parking, and in doing so, making their travel experience more cost-effective and environmentally friendly.
However, despite these successes, we have also recognized a critical challenge. The rate of our growth is not keeping pace with demand, particularly from our community members outside of the Netherlands and Belgium who are eager to leverage our app. They frequently question why we have not yet introduced similar mobility or travel-related services in their countries. These valid concerns have urged us to reassess our approach and consider the broader implications for our project.
This realization sparked a new era in our project. We understood that without significant changes, our project would fail to progress to the next stage of development. This understanding led us to MobiFi 2.0.
In this whitepaper, we aim to outline our strategic direction, detailing the path we envision for the future of MobiFi. Our hope is that this document will serve as a guidepost, charting our course as we seek to expand the reach of our innovative solutions and drive further adoption of our offerings across the globe.
The ability to travel and travel far distance makes humanbeing as it is today. Our ancient travels all the way from Africa to Europe, Asia and America to explore new world and establish their new life. Innovations like bicycles, automobiles, airplane gives us opportunities to move to anywhere in the world and even out space as we want. Today, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and many other companies are working hard to build spaceship and rocket to make human become a multi-planetary spices. In essence, travel and the ability to move around is critically important and it will never disappear.
Although COVID has reduced the travel need, especially commuting in the last 3 years, the travel needs rebounded quickly after restriction was removed. An estimated 235 million tourists travelled internationally in the first three months, more than double the same period of 2022. Overall, international arrivals reached 80% of pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2023[1]. We have no doubt that travel needs will recover even outpace the demands before COVID.
Another important change we noticed is that more and more companies start to allow remote working. According to the report from Deloitte[2], over 53% organizations allow a hybrid way of work, i.e, employees have to go to office sometimes. About 27% of the organizations allow their employee to work fully remote on a regular basis. Only 10% the respondents in the research saying that their employers do not allow any kind of hybrid or remote working as a matter of course. More and more digital nomads appear in our life. The growth in people becoming digital nomads over the last 4 years has been huge. The Covid pandemic only seems to have accelerated the movement even further. There are currently over 35 million[3] digital nomads worldwide as of 2023.
Remote working, globally travel and international payment transactions make digital nomad a perfect group adopt cryptocurrency in their work and life. They call themselves “crypto nomad”. As a crypto project building products in the mobility industry, we see this fit and believe it has a huge potential to increase crypto adoption and even for non-crypto users. By far, there are over 420 million crypto users worldwide, the ownership rate is about 4.2%[4]. Based on leading venture capital Andreessen Horowitz, we are still in the early days.
