We have seen an introduction of many novel sharing platforms in the past decade in Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Turo, TaskRabbit, Instacart, and many more. These have all made life more convenient in various ways. From booking a ride home on your phone, to getting take out or groceries delivered during a pandemic.
As great as these benefits are we have also seen numerous problems across these platforms, including labor and employment issues, regulation gray areas, and negative impacts on local economies. Almost every existing platform has had controversial issues like these, regardless of the particular industry (ridesharing, food delivery, lodging, etc).
We believe a major cause of these issues is today's sharing economy platforms do not face competitive pressure in enough areas. While there are many "Uber for X" platforms, there is usually a very small number of them in any one area: Uber and Lyft for rides, Instacart for groceries, Airbnb for lodging, etc. These platforms compete ruthlessly to acquire new users and workers, expand into new markets, and optimize profits. They are incentivized to grow as quickly as possible, since these are often winner-takes-all market opportunities. What if these platforms were also incentivized to compete on how they treat workers, how they impact local economies, or many other criteria besides growth and profit?
The mission of Ligo is to increase competition among builders in the sharing economy by creating an open platform that allows anyone to create diverse sharing solutions.
Openness drives competition and pluralism and can create more fair markets. The web3 and blockchain ecosystem has shown how openness achieves this.
DeFi has shown how a more open financial system can create a wide diversity of financial products besides banking-powered personal savings accounts.
Openness has resulted in a healthy and competitive market of layer 2 solutions that are all trying to solve scalability problems using very different approaches.
Ethereum and other blockchains have shown how diversity and competition among client implementations can create a more secure network than a private blockchain with a single implementation.
The following areas are where we see value that openness can provide.
One of the largest barriers new entrants face is needing to solve the two-sided market problem. A builder should be able to reach everyone in either side of the market without needing to invest large amounts of capital to change people's behaviors and habits.
Many sharing economy platforms need to invest heavily in infrastructure and technology to have a competitive product. A builder should have access to basic infrastructure needed to power their solutions.
Having a specific payment or pricing model inhibits innovation. Builders should be able to use various payment methods and compete with different pricing models.
The 5-star review rating system is the common trust mechanism used in platforms today and does not come without flaws. Builders should be able to experiment with different trust mechanisms and innovate beyond the primitive 5-star system.
Most platforms today are shareholder and VC-backed startups that grow as fast as possible and later extract profits from other stakeholders. Builders should be able to experiment with different ownership models without compromising any competitive advantage.
The initial area Ligo is focusing on is car sharing. The car sharing market has high demand, but a wide range of needs depending on the community. This is a great opportunity for an open platform to compete as large platforms are not serving the needs of various niche communities.
We are currently in the design and prototyping phase. Check out the latest at:
Our goal is to have this platform be a public good that is both competitive and sustainable. The organizational and funding structure will determine how successful we are at these. Keep an eye out for future posts on some ideas we have.
Ligo has not received any investment to date, only small grants and hackathon prizes. If you would like to support us in these early stages, feel free to collect this post as an NFT.