The story of ROADRUNR: why we started a drive to earn protocol with the mission of transforming the road

ROADRUNR is a Web3 startup that’s bringing tokenization, GameFi, and blockchain to real-world vehicles and driving. ROADRUNR’s Blade devices, CAR NFTs, and Driver DApp make any Vehicle a blockchain-connected one. The ROADRUNR protocol lets users earn rewards for the miles they already drive.

Founded in 2021 by a team of vehicle intelligence and robotics engineers, data scientists, and crypto analysts, ROADRUNR will be the first Web3 of Vehicles. ROADRUNR’s mission is to make driving safe, sustainable, and affordable through data ownership and decentralization.

ROADRUNR is being built on the IoTeX blockchain’s MachineFi platform and is launching on July 22. With IoTeX as the lead investor, ROADRUNR is raising a private seed round of $2.5 million USD at a pre-money valuation of $20 million USD.

In the early 2000s, I led a logistics and transportation technology organization that opened my eyes to the extensive use of telematics, or technology that gathers and transmits data on vehicle use, maintenance, and servicing. Even then, the use of telematics devices was extremely established because of how competitive the freight and passenger transportation industry is. Telematics were and still are used to squeeze efficiency — that is, data that can be monetized — out of fleets.

Fast forward to the late 2010s and two things are happening — professionally, I was becoming fascinated with Bitcoin and subsequent blockchain IoT projects like Helium and IoTeX. Personally, I started using BlaBlaCar for the hundreds of trips a year I make between Bombay, where my parents live, and Pune, where my wife and I live. (I used it so much as both a driver and passenger that they named me a country ambassador.) Not long after, my co-founders and I began looking for highly centralized industries where data was siloed and common real world assets that had not yet been digitized — an opportunity to connect the value of web3 to the physical world.

Unlike Uber, when you take a ride through BlaBlaCar, you don’t know anything about the driver. Even with Uber ratings, you don’t really know how safe a driver or their vehicle is. Though ridesharing models also expose drivers to violence and abuse, safety is often top of mind for passengers. Then, there’s trust in a vehicle’s history. Is CARFAX enough when buying a used car? If you don’t live in the US or Canada, do you even know what CARFAX is?

The thing is, with the rise of connected cars — cars with built-in telematics, unadulterated vehicle and driver data is already continuously being generated en masse. It’s just not publicly available, let alone on blockchain. It’s all just sitting with OEMs. And since they’re simply in the business of making and selling vehicles, not maintaining, repairing, or reselling them, they have zero incentive to look at that data. Even if it could benefit drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, and entire cities.

Vehicle data doesn’t just have relevance — and value — because of safety. With the rise of electric vehicles, traffic congestion getting worse, and aging fleets, vehicle data will play a critical role in eliminating the negative sustainability impact of driving. Data ownership will represent true economic opportunity for gig drivers, and use of this data will relieve the rising economic burden associated with owning a vehicle, the most valuable depreciating asset a household generally owns.

When we started realizing how immense the opportunity to create a driver-powered vehicle data economy was, we started having conversations. One of our key learnings from these was that there are very few car data privacy laws around the world. Not to say that they currently do, but OEMs theoretically have the ability, or soon will, to see what you’re doing and hear what you’re saying in your car. Right now, it’s on OEMs to use this data responsibly. Most countries don’t have any protections around vehicle data. The US has none. Learning about this gap in protection added urgency to our plans.

18 months later, and we’ve developed our own blockchain-connected telematics device and accompanying vehicle data model, the most comprehensive and universal view of vehicle health and behavior ever created. We’ve tested our Blade on-board diagnostics, or OBD, devices on almost 100 vehicles and 35 models in the US and India. During that time, we watched developments in the play to earn and move to earn space and decided to incorporate gamefi and socialfi elements into our project through the addition of rewards, gaming, and NFTs. We won grants from IoTeX, Harmony, and NEAR and recruited advisors from industries like web3, auto, finance, and media. This summer, the mint of our gaming NFTs and our tracking, insights, and gaming driver dapp will go live, as will our gamefi token listing.

If you’re interested in becoming a ROADRUNR user, community member, contributor, team member, or investor, please follow us and get in touch.

WHAT IT DOES

MOTODB is the company that has designed ROADRUNR, it is both a simple Mobile Game for entry-level Drivers and progressively an interactive and Connected Car Data Analytics Platform for Advanced Drivers — and anyone in between! For Entry-level Drivers and Players-Gamers, the ROADRUNR Mobile Game pays tokens for each MILE they drive; the game token ($SDT Safe Driving Token) can be earned either actively or passively. The Governance Token ($CAR) can be earned after a Player hits maximum level.

At the centre of the ROADRUNR game lies the virtual twin of your car, your own CAR NFT which can be minted at a negligible cost (only gas fees <$1).

In order to play the game, one needs to purchase ROADRUNR gaming NFTs. These NFTs give reward-earning attributes to the CAR NFT. At least one NFT from each of the 3 categories gaming NFTs : BODY, ENGINE and WHEEL are needed to start earning $SDT tokens.

For an Advanced Driver who wants to engage with their Vehicles deeply, we have a range of devices that can be plugged into their Car called the ROADRUNR BLADE Series. Our entry-level devices are OBD-based devices (On-board Diagnostics) that are plug-and-play devices that allow Drivers to earn higher game tokens ($SDT). The BLADE Series has advanced OBD devices, Dash Cams and Car Sensors.

The essence of the ROADRUNR Protocol and Game is to engage a Driver with their Vehicle and to get all Drivers to the crypto community, starting from getting them to earn some tokens in their wallets by simply Driving. Once they have some tokens in their wallet, they will think about cashing out and this will motivate them to use decentralised exchanges/ wallets and also to engage more meaningfully with the crypto ecosystem.

HOW WE BUILT IT

We initially worked for almost a year on IoT (OBD On-board Diagnostics) plugged into a Vehicle and conducted extensive POCs in India and the USA on almost 100 Cars of varying models. We were captivated by the idea of capturing scarce Car Data and putting it on a public blockchain — the first time in the world this has been done. We were enthralled and riveted by the idea of putting the World’s Vehicle Data on a public blockchain — an unrivalled, single source of Truth for all Vehicles.

Given our strong Technology, Robotics, AI, Computer Science backgrounds, we were able to successfully deploy our own designed IoT devices, capture detailed Vehicle Data and store it on a public blockchain.

As we were developing our IoT+Blockchain project, initially titled MOTODB, we were watching developments in the play2earn and move2earn space with keen interest. The idea of doing something real (in the real world) to earn was interesting and we finally decided to incorporate several key elements of Game-Fi and Social-Fi into our new Avatar — ROADRUNR. As we studied the popular Game-Fi on the market, we concluded that a successful Mobile Game-Fi has to be able to transfer the game assets conveniently, fast and cheap. We have built the Game around a built-in decentralised wallet that can transfer game assets, a swap and cross-chain convert.

After comparing and contrasting several top public chains, we picked IoTEX, Harmony and NEAR — all of whom awarded us grants to #build. We finally chose IoTEX because it has a number of things we were looking for, including MachineFi (the Web3 Machine economy), a fast, secure, scalable blockchain and a decentralised data storage and streaming platform, TruStream.

We have focused on making Driving engaging and interesting for Drivers, through gamification and Social-Fi elements, while also focusing on that rarest of data elements, Vehicle Data. While we realise that the financial part of the Game is important, because that is what is attractive to most people, we also feel that to really retain players in the game itself, it has to be appealing and agreeable to the Players and Drivers. We have added a comprehensive achievements/ reward/ challenge system, created various NFTs of a Vehicle (Car, Engine, Wheels, Body for now) and have developed further fun game plots to put value to the task of Driving — we think that this will result in the biggest player retainer factor for ROADRUNR.

CHALLENGES WE RAN INTO

Designing NFTs for Car, Engine, Wheel and Body — we are still refining and fine-tuning it.

Balancing and making the Game attractive for the Player, Driver and the Driver-Player. Creating value propositions for each of these participants, who are unique for us.

To reduce the sell pressure, we have designed Game token ($SDT) to have huge utility in the ROADRUNR game for — NFT Minting, NFT repair, Player Level-up, NFT Leasing / renting, Event participation

Anti-cheating mechanism design (solving through machine learning)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS WE ARE PROUD OF

We have conducted POCs in India and the USA on 100+ Cars with 35 different Models and have recorded various aspects of Car Data using our custom-designed OBD device. One of our POC Cars drained its battery overnight because our OBD device did not switch off, and there were several such learnings for us. The final product is glitch-free and has been battle-tested.

Finished UI/ UX design for the first Global launch of our NFTs slated to happen by the first week of July’22. DApp design is complete and will be launched by the first week of Aug ‘22.

Have onboarded advisors from the Crypto industry, Vehicle/ Car Industry, Traditional Finance/ Investments background and the Media industry for community building.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Combining Game-Fi, Social-Fi, IoT (hardware devices) and blockchain requires very high attention to making the Game simple and attractive for everyday Drivers, and also making it appealing to Car-lovers and intensive users of Vehicles who require solid and detailed data. Luckily, we have strong tech backgrounds and experience, so that helped.

Every Vehicle Model is different, at least as far as the various ports go for plugging in our devices!

Changing names for our project is hard work, like naming a child.

Fine tuning our Pitch to Investors and defining the real pain points for Drivers and Customers.

Focusing on details is important, but not losing sight of the bigger picture and our Vision is even more important!

WHAT’S NEXT FOR ROADRUNR

Finish private seed round by August, release MVP in August and use the funds raised to get 1million Drivers to adopt ROADRUNR by the end of the year.

Potential Impact and Novelty: ROADRUNR is a one-of-a-kind project that has combined elements of Game-Fi, Social-Fi, IoT (hardware), Software and Blockchain — we expect this to attract Drivers from across the World who have different interests into the Crypto ecosystem and the IoTEX ecosystem of MachineFi.

Design: We have several experienced Game developers, IoT device developers/ manufacturers, web2 experts for Software App and UI/ UX developers working on ROADRUNR.

GTM Strategy: We will start with building the Crypto community before the full product release. After the full product release to the market, we will focus on attracting non-Crypto Drivers and Players, while also leveraging mainstream media on the topic of making Driving Safe, sustainable and affordable.

Functionality: Our NFTs will launch globally in the first week of July for sale on IoTEX Chain initially and then we will go multi-chain on other EVM compatible chains including Harmony, Polygon, NEAR, BSC, Solana, etc.

The story of ROADRUNR: why we started a drive to earn protocol with the mission of transforming the road

ROADRUNR is a Web3 startup that’s bringing tokenization, GameFi, and blockchain to real-world vehicles and driving. ROADRUNR’s Blade devices, CAR NFTs, and Driver DApp make any Vehicle a blockchain-connected one. The ROADRUNR protocol lets users earn rewards for the miles they already drive.

Founded in 2021 by a team of vehicle intelligence and robotics engineers, data scientists, and crypto analysts, ROADRUNR will be the first Web3 of Vehicles. ROADRUNR’s mission is to make driving safe, sustainable, and affordable through data ownership and decentralization.

ROADRUNR is being built on the IoTeX blockchain’s MachineFi platform and is launching on July 22. With IoTeX as the lead investor, ROADRUNR is raising a private seed round of $2.5 million USD at a pre-money valuation of $20 million USD.

In the early 2000s, I led a logistics and transportation technology organization that opened my eyes to the extensive use of telematics, or technology that gathers and transmits data on vehicle use, maintenance, and servicing. Even then, the use of telematics devices was extremely established because of how competitive the freight and passenger transportation industry is. Telematics were and still are used to squeeze efficiency — that is, data that can be monetized — out of fleets.

Fast forward to the late 2010s and two things are happening — professionally, I was becoming fascinated with Bitcoin and subsequent blockchain IoT projects like Helium and IoTeX. Personally, I started using BlaBlaCar for the hundreds of trips a year I make between Bombay, where my parents live, and Pune, where my wife and I live. (I used it so much as both a driver and passenger that they named me a country ambassador.) Not long after, my co-founders and I began looking for highly centralized industries where data was siloed and common real world assets that had not yet been digitized — an opportunity to connect the value of web3 to the physical world.

Unlike Uber, when you take a ride through BlaBlaCar, you don’t know anything about the driver. Even with Uber ratings, you don’t really know how safe a driver or their vehicle is. Though ridesharing models also expose drivers to violence and abuse, safety is often top of mind for passengers. Then, there’s trust in a vehicle’s history. Is CARFAX enough when buying a used car? If you don’t live in the US or Canada, do you even know what CARFAX is?

The thing is, with the rise of connected cars — cars with built-in telematics, unadulterated vehicle and driver data is already continuously being generated en masse. It’s just not publicly available, let alone on blockchain. It’s all just sitting with OEMs. And since they’re simply in the business of making and selling vehicles, not maintaining, repairing, or reselling them, they have zero incentive to look at that data. Even if it could benefit drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, and entire cities.

Vehicle data doesn’t just have relevance — and value — because of safety. With the rise of electric vehicles, traffic congestion getting worse, and aging fleets, vehicle data will play a critical role in eliminating the negative sustainability impact of driving. Data ownership will represent true economic opportunity for gig drivers, and use of this data will relieve the rising economic burden associated with owning a vehicle, the most valuable depreciating asset a household generally owns.

When we started realizing how immense the opportunity to create a driver-powered vehicle data economy was, we started having conversations. One of our key learnings from these was that there are very few car data privacy laws around the world. Not to say that they currently do, but OEMs theoretically have the ability, or soon will, to see what you’re doing and hear what you’re saying in your car. Right now, it’s on OEMs to use this data responsibly. Most countries don’t have any protections around vehicle data. The US has none. Learning about this gap in protection added urgency to our plans.

18 months later, and we’ve developed our own blockchain-connected telematics device and accompanying vehicle data model, the most comprehensive and universal view of vehicle health and behavior ever created. We’ve tested our Blade on-board diagnostics, or OBD, devices on almost 100 vehicles and 35 models in the US and India. During that time, we watched developments in the play to earn and move to earn space and decided to incorporate gamefi and socialfi elements into our project through the addition of rewards, gaming, and NFTs. We won grants from IoTeX, Harmony, and NEAR and recruited advisors from industries like web3, auto, finance, and media. This summer, the mint of our gaming NFTs and our tracking, insights, and gaming driver dapp will go live, as will our gamefi token listing.

If you’re interested in becoming a ROADRUNR user, community member, contributor, team member, or investor, please follow us and get in touch.

WHAT IT DOES

MOTODB is the company that has designed ROADRUNR, it is both a simple Mobile Game for entry-level Drivers and progressively an interactive and Connected Car Data Analytics Platform for Advanced Drivers — and anyone in between! For Entry-level Drivers and Players-Gamers, the ROADRUNR Mobile Game pays tokens for each MILE they drive; the game token ($SDT Safe Driving Token) can be earned either actively or passively. The Governance Token ($CAR) can be earned after a Player hits maximum level.

At the centre of the ROADRUNR game lies the virtual twin of your car, your own CAR NFT which can be minted at a negligible cost (only gas fees <$1).

In order to play the game, one needs to purchase ROADRUNR gaming NFTs. These NFTs give reward-earning attributes to the CAR NFT. At least one NFT from each of the 3 categories gaming NFTs : BODY, ENGINE and WHEEL are needed to start earning $SDT tokens.

For an Advanced Driver who wants to engage with their Vehicles deeply, we have a range of devices that can be plugged into their Car called the ROADRUNR BLADE Series. Our entry-level devices are OBD-based devices (On-board Diagnostics) that are plug-and-play devices that allow Drivers to earn higher game tokens ($SDT). The BLADE Series has advanced OBD devices, Dash Cams and Car Sensors.

The essence of the ROADRUNR Protocol and Game is to engage a Driver with their Vehicle and to get all Drivers to the crypto community, starting from getting them to earn some tokens in their wallets by simply Driving. Once they have some tokens in their wallet, they will think about cashing out and this will motivate them to use decentralised exchanges/ wallets and also to engage more meaningfully with the crypto ecosystem.

HOW WE BUILT IT

We initially worked for almost a year on IoT (OBD On-board Diagnostics) plugged into a Vehicle and conducted extensive POCs in India and the USA on almost 100 Cars of varying models. We were captivated by the idea of capturing scarce Car Data and putting it on a public blockchain — the first time in the world this has been done. We were enthralled and riveted by the idea of putting the World’s Vehicle Data on a public blockchain — an unrivalled, single source of Truth for all Vehicles.

Given our strong Technology, Robotics, AI, Computer Science backgrounds, we were able to successfully deploy our own designed IoT devices, capture detailed Vehicle Data and store it on a public blockchain.

As we were developing our IoT+Blockchain project, initially titled MOTODB, we were watching developments in the play2earn and move2earn space with keen interest. The idea of doing something real (in the real world) to earn was interesting and we finally decided to incorporate several key elements of Game-Fi and Social-Fi into our new Avatar — ROADRUNR. As we studied the popular Game-Fi on the market, we concluded that a successful Mobile Game-Fi has to be able to transfer the game assets conveniently, fast and cheap. We have built the Game around a built-in decentralised wallet that can transfer game assets, a swap and cross-chain convert.

After comparing and contrasting several top public chains, we picked IoTEX, Harmony and NEAR — all of whom awarded us grants to #build. We finally chose IoTEX because it has a number of things we were looking for, including MachineFi (the Web3 Machine economy), a fast, secure, scalable blockchain and a decentralised data storage and streaming platform, TruStream.

We have focused on making Driving engaging and interesting for Drivers, through gamification and Social-Fi elements, while also focusing on that rarest of data elements, Vehicle Data. While we realise that the financial part of the Game is important, because that is what is attractive to most people, we also feel that to really retain players in the game itself, it has to be appealing and agreeable to the Players and Drivers. We have added a comprehensive achievements/ reward/ challenge system, created various NFTs of a Vehicle (Car, Engine, Wheels, Body for now) and have developed further fun game plots to put value to the task of Driving — we think that this will result in the biggest player retainer factor for ROADRUNR.

CHALLENGES WE RAN INTO

Designing NFTs for Car, Engine, Wheel and Body — we are still refining and fine-tuning it.

Balancing and making the Game attractive for the Player, Driver and the Driver-Player. Creating value propositions for each of these participants, who are unique for us.

To reduce the sell pressure, we have designed Game token ($SDT) to have huge utility in the ROADRUNR game for — NFT Minting, NFT repair, Player Level-up, NFT Leasing / renting, Event participation

Anti-cheating mechanism design (solving through machine learning)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS WE ARE PROUD OF

We have conducted POCs in India and the USA on 100+ Cars with 35 different Models and have recorded various aspects of Car Data using our custom-designed OBD device. One of our POC Cars drained its battery overnight because our OBD device did not switch off, and there were several such learnings for us. The final product is glitch-free and has been battle-tested.

Finished UI/ UX design for the first Global launch of our NFTs slated to happen by the first week of July’22. DApp design is complete and will be launched by the first week of Aug ‘22.

Have onboarded advisors from the Crypto industry, Vehicle/ Car Industry, Traditional Finance/ Investments background and the Media industry for community building.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Combining Game-Fi, Social-Fi, IoT (hardware devices) and blockchain requires very high attention to making the Game simple and attractive for everyday Drivers, and also making it appealing to Car-lovers and intensive users of Vehicles who require solid and detailed data. Luckily, we have strong tech backgrounds and experience, so that helped.

Every Vehicle Model is different, at least as far as the various ports go for plugging in our devices!

Changing names for our project is hard work, like naming a child.

Fine tuning our Pitch to Investors and defining the real pain points for Drivers and Customers.

Focusing on details is important, but not losing sight of the bigger picture and our Vision is even more important!

WHAT’S NEXT FOR ROADRUNR

Finish private seed round by August, release MVP in August and use the funds raised to get 1million Drivers to adopt ROADRUNR by the end of the year.

Potential Impact and Novelty: ROADRUNR is a one-of-a-kind project that has combined elements of Game-Fi, Social-Fi, IoT (hardware), Software and Blockchain — we expect this to attract Drivers from across the World who have different interests into the Crypto ecosystem and the IoTEX ecosystem of MachineFi.

Design: We have several experienced Game developers, IoT device developers/ manufacturers, web2 experts for Software App and UI/ UX developers working on ROADRUNR.

GTM Strategy: We will start with building the Crypto community before the full product release. After the full product release to the market, we will focus on attracting non-Crypto Drivers and Players, while also leveraging mainstream media on the topic of making Driving Safe, sustainable and affordable.

Functionality: Our NFTs will launch globally in the first week of July for sale on IoTEX Chain initially and then we will go multi-chain on other EVM compatible chains including Harmony, Polygon, NEAR, BSC, Solana, etc.