Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has accepted the professional auditing role for the La’Zooz crypto-based ridesharing project. He will verify that the project’s milestones are achieved. La'Zooz core team member, Shay Zluf, said:
“We hope this to be a turning point in the La'Zooz token sale, as many of the Bitcoin community members will see that as a vote of confidence from one of the most appreciated figures in the community.”
Vitalik will be partnering with Craig Sellars from the Omni foundation who has also accepted the auditing role for the project.
Decentralized Ridesharing Roadmap
Roadmap auditing plays a crucial role for the project. Raised funds go into a multisignature Coinbase vault that requires approval of milestones by the auditor prior to being released to the development team’s wallet. Funds will then be released into the vault by 3 out of 5 signers — two from La'Zooz, two from the Omni dev team, and someone other than Buterin from Ethereum.
The La'Zooz project, which is currently issuing its tokens on top of the Omni layer, plans to use Ethereum's smart contracts as its token stabilizing mechanism. The La’Zooz team has been in touch with Ethereum devs and co-founders “for several months.” Zluf said:
“We are excited to have [Buterin] on board with us as our auditor.”
The auditing role at blockchain based projects has become a new standard in the industry (and potentially beyond) as another step to raise trust between supporters of new Bitcoin 2.0 projects and the development teams.
He continued, “As the token sale function was engineered in a way to keep prices low as long as no big traction has achieved, we believe it to be still a very attractive opportunity for our supporters to help the vision of La'Zooz come alive.”
The number of blockchain based projects has been rising dramatically in the past year, and it is becoming increasingly important to build confidence with potential supporters who may be wary of getting burned. As one of the most influential and trusted figures in the Bitcoin community, Buterin is sure to add some weight to the ambitious decentralized ridesharing project that aims “to replace your car with your smartphone.”
What’s Next
La’Zooz has been part of the Bitcoin 2.0 community since 2013, winning several hackathons. The project uses Zooz crypto tokens to facilitate mass collaboration that is needed to develop the first user base. They will then be used to launch the real-time ridesharing service into operation.
Once the app goes live, the Zooz token will be used to pay for the services provided by the app. The project uses the same token to incentivize both early adopters and its development community.
La’Zooz is working with a pincer strategy. On the grassroots level, the project’s mining app already has over 2,000 users worldwide acting as “Road Miners” sharing their location with the community. They are rewarded in return with “Road Zooz” tokens. This way the app is creating the transportation network before the service goes live, minimizing disappointment from users expecting a ride before there is someone available to pick them up.
Road Zooz tokens will be usable within the app to pay drivers for shared rides, but they won’t be tradable, thus lowering spoofing potential and flooding of the Zooz ecosystem.
On the top-down level, La’Zooz is in touch with several “leading players of the smart transportation industry” (public transportation providers, municipalities, etc.) to offer “white label” solutions for their specific communities and customers. One of these features is a “last mile” solution for train passengers, matching users who are heading from the train station to the same destination, helping them share rides.
The La’Zooz token sale is currently underway until the July 30, 2015, and early purchasers receive larger discounts. You can find out more about the La’Zooz project in their 19-page white paper. Join the development community on Slack through the La’Zooz website.
They will hold an AMA on their YouTube channel on June 15 at 7pm GMT.