Ryde CEO: ‘NFTs offer greater operational efficiencies in administering a membership programme than traditional systems’

Last week, Singaporean ride-hailing company Ryde announced that it would launch an NFT (non-fungible tokens) project in Asia targeting its community. Ryde, the first ride-hailing company in Singapore to accept crypto payments, wants to deploy NFTs to generate more real-world value, especially for the rapidly growing market segment of Singaporeans who hold crypto. The NFTs will unlock exclusive in-app rewards and benefits for owners.

The Sea Group-backed Ryde, which boasts over 200,000 monthly active users, also announced expanding its crypto payment model by adding over 70 currencies and ten different blockchain networks.

On Thursday, e27 spoke to its Founder and CEO, Terence Zou, to learn more about its NFT project and the crypto payments model.

Below is the edited version of the interview:

What is RydePal, and why is the firm venturing into NFTs?

RydePals, Asia’s first ride-hailing NFT, is aimed at members of our Ryde+ subscription plan. Each RydePal will be built using generative art, a combination of different design elements such as gender and age, colour, and accessories, representing the diversity of our users in the Ryde community.

To be eligible for the chance to receive a RydePal NFT, the first 3,350 people must hold an active Ryde+ subscription by 31 May 2022. The RydePal NFTs have real-world utility as they give NFT holders access to exclusive reward tiers in the Ryde app.

Also Read: Ryde plans for IPO on SGX, aims to capture 30 per cent of Singapore’s ride-sharing market

Outside of this token sale, RydePal NFTs can only be earned through an in-app activity like accumulating rides or staking RydeCoins in the Ryde wallet. The RydePals can also be traded on secondary NFT exchanges like OpenSea.

NFTs are great tools for building loyalty among communities. While designing RydePals, we spent a lot of time thinking about how other NFT project communities and game developers keep their communities engaged and reward desirable in-app activities.

NFTs also offer greater operational efficiencies in administering a membership programme than traditional systems. It does not rely on Ryde as a central authority to maintain a ledger of its members, and they are free to trade the NFTs as they see fit. All benefits and rights accrue to users whose wallets hold the NFTs.

Few NFTs today have real-world utility. With this project, we hope to deploy NFTs in a way that generates more real-world value, especially for the rapidly growing market segment of Singaporeans who hold crypto assets.

Can you tell us how RydePals works?

The table below outlines our NFT allocation breakdown according to the type of NFT offerings (standard versus rare), the platform where it may be purchased (via a Ryde+ subscription or through public minting), and the assigned price point or value per piece.

For the ‘Reserved Stock’ section, a quantity of 500 will be reserved for our top drivers who have excellent ratings and reviews. The NFTs will be airdropped to the first 500 drivers to meet the stipulated criteria: complete 400 trips in any three months between April and June 2022.

What are NFTs important in the ride-hailing vertical?

Our mission at Ryde has always been to “make every ride a better one”. Offering better prices is not the only or most sustainable way for us to give people reasons to choose to ride with us. Our driver-partners must be compensated fairly too.

NFTs are just one way that we try to give users another reason to choose Ryde. We believe that our “ride-to-earn” model of breeding new NFTs and gamifying rewards can turn each ride into something rather fun and exciting.

While Singapore is a fast-growing crypto market, NFTs are yet to take off in a big way. How do you plan to create awareness about NFTs among your subscribers and driver-partners?

NFTs have varied use cases across different industries that have yet to be fully explored. This provides us with an excellent opportunity to take the innovation lead.

RydePals will be the first major issuance of NFTs by a large, consumer-facing company in Singapore. We hope to generate greater awareness about NFTs among a more diverse base of Singaporeans.

As for our subscribers and driver-partners, we will provide detailed instructions on how they can set up a crypto wallet to hold the RydePals, and how to trade them on NFT marketplaces.

Ryde introduced crypto payments in 2020. How has been the response so far? What have been some of the challenges it has faced?

We started accepting crypto payments through Bitcoin in 2020. Since then, we have seen our users choose to top up their wallets with BTC.

Also Read: Collecting pixels: NFTs and the future of collectibles

Existing crypto payment gateways have limitations. One barrier to enterprise adoption of crypto payments is their pseudonymous nature and code-heavy formats; they are problematic for various bookkeeping, audit and other compliance reasons.

We have chosen to work with Request Finance, an enterprise crypto invoicing web app, to make it easy to accept crypto payments and bill our users in crypto. Request Finance has great enterprise-grade features like a single dashboard to manage all our crypto invoices. It also helps us see real-time payment confirmations, schedule recurring invoices, accurate mark-to-market prices at invoice payment, and integrate with accounting software like Quickbooks/Xero.

These basic features are currently lacking in the crypto payments space.

Do you expect your move to encourage more organisations in Southeast Asia to introduce NFTs?

RydePals will be the first major issuance of NFTs by a large, consumer-facing company in Singapore. We hope to generate greater awareness about NFTs among a more diverse base of Singaporean consumers and get more companies to seriously consider how NFTs can be of real value.

But as business leaders, we do our very best to avoid doing things for their own sake and must be mindful not to encourage irresponsible speculation. Technologies like NFTs are neither inherently good nor bad. At Ryde, we were deliberate about using NFTs in a commercially sensible and socially responsible manner.

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