The model seeks to encourage the authorities to improve the quality of public services. The concept can be applied to other services to track flight or subway delays.
In recent years, the incidence of human defecation on the streets of San Francisco, USA, one of the most populous cities in the world, has tripled to 3,000 incidents per month. This growing health problem led a team of developers of the Universal Market Access (UMA) Protocol to create the Poop Token. This is an asset of the ERC-20 standard, which tracks the amount of waste sighted on the streets, using an official database.
As published, the Poop Token emerged as a response to this problem, mainly caused by the increase in homelessness. The asset was conceived between November 8th and 10th at a meeting aimed at encouraging developers to cooperate in the construction of decentralized applications on Ethereum.
Hart Lambur and other developers put into practice the idea of Daniel Que and Tyson Battistella de Coinbase by creating the token project whose prices are based on data recorded in the local service known as SF311, which reported in 2018 more than 28,000 calls on cases of fecal matter being spread on the streets of San Francisco. In any case, when the amount of waste increases, the token price also increases. On the other hand, the price of the asset decreases as the city looks cleaner.
Assuming that the city of San Francisco wants to act as outlined in the initiative and commit to solving the problem, a cryptocurrency could be issued to be sold to residents at USD 10mm per unit, considering a rate of 3,000 sightings per month. If the city can reduce the sighting rate to 1,500 per month, it would get USD 5mm in profits. On the contrary, if the reports double to 6,000 per month, the city would acquire a debt of USD 10mm.
The developers admit that the token could become an economic incentive to encourage defecating in public places, and thus worsen the problem. However, they believe that laws and social customs will prevent this from happening. In fact, Lambur suggests the possibility of using crypto assets to encourage authorities to improve the quality of public services.
The publication also suggests that the concept can be applied to other similar contexts. For example, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is responsible for the entire New York Metro system, could issue crypto assets that compensate for subway delays. Likewise, airlines could issue assets that track flight delays and so on.
Applauded Idea
The proposal of the token to track human waste on the streets of San Francisco has been applauded on Twitter by several users, who have expressed their impressions. For example, Stephen Cohen of the Capital Ventures software team noted that he considered this use of a DeFi to be the best that he had seen and suggested reducing it to a neighborhood level.
This proposal to compensate users, customers or citizens when companies or governments do not keep their promises is novel. However, there are similar ideas in which cities would reward their inhabitants for their good behavior to improve the quality of life in those spaces. For example, in the city of Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland, a plan to launch its own cryptocurrency was started. The token, Belfast Coin, allows incentivizing people in exchange for activities such as shopping in local businesses, volunteering, and civic activities, among others.
By Willmen Blanco
