Bitcoin continues to reach higher valuations and shows no signs of slowing down. The explosive growth of the most popular cryptocurrency has turned a previously fringe technology, the blockchain, into a mainstream concern.
If you don’t want to invest in Bitcoin, you do have other options. KiriCoin, a new venture from Fiat, will reward drivers for handling their vehicles sustainably. But what does that mean, and what can you do with KiriCoin?
What Is KiriCoin?
As laid out in a recent blog post, Stellantis, the Fiat vehicle brand owner, announced that it has partnered with Kiri Technologies to create the KiriCoin cryptocurrency. This will initially be available on the all-electric Fiat New 500. Primarily, the cryptocurrency will be used to reward those who drive sustainably, although it’s not clear what the company considers sustainable.
However, this is a reasonably passive way to earn cryptocurrency. You’ll need the Fiat New 500 electric car, the vehicle’s connected infotainment system, and the Fiat smartphone app.
As you drive, the car collects data like distance and speed and uploads this to the Kiri cloud, where an algorithm converts your driving data into KiriCoins. After you’ve completed your trip, open the Fiat app, and your KiriCoins will be shown in your virtual wallet.
You can redeem your KiriCoins for goods and services in the Kiri Marketplace. Importantly, Stellantis is only a partner in this project rather than the developer. Instead, the KiriCoins platform was created by Kiri Technologies, who also operate the Kiri Marketplace.
The company uses these digital tokens to reward sustainable behaviors, like using an electric vehicle, choosing a renewable energy supplier, and purchasing environmentally-friendly household products. As a result, it is more practical than the Elon Musk-backed Dogecoin.
According to the release, driving efficiently within a city for one kilometer generates approximately one KiriCoin. At present, each KiriCoin has an estimated value of two euro cents. Based on this performance, you could expect to collect KiriCoins worth around €150 per year based on 10,000km of travel.
Although you can currently only generate KiriCoins by driving your Fiat New 500, the integration could expand further into Kiri’s lifestyle-based rewards, too.
To further incentivize your driving habits, Stellantis has developed the eco:Score, which marks the efficiency of your driving between zero and 100, and places you on a global real-time leaderboard. The drivers with the highest scores will get access to discounts and offers from big technology brands like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Spotify.
Why Drive Sustainably?
On the surface, it makes sense that the company would want to incentivize environmentally-friendly practices. Driving is incredibly damaging to the environment and contributes to the current climate emergency.
In theory, electric vehicles reduce some of the pollution generated by car travel. However, there’s still a significant environmental impact from electricity generation and the car’s production materials.
Similarly, aggressive driving causes components to wear quickly. This is particularly true of tires, which shed microplastics into the environment as you drive. By being mindful of the way you drive, it’s possible to reduce this wear, improve road safety, and use less energy.
Electric cars also come with regenerative braking, which captures energy lost during braking to heat. By minimizing braking, especially sudden stops, you can recapture more energy to recharge the vehicle’s battery.
By considering your driving habits, you improve the ride’s efficiency, thus reducing how often you’ll need to recharge your car. Not only is this good for your wallet, but it is also better for the environment.
Likewise, suppose you’re investing in a brand new electric vehicle. In that case, you probably care about the environmental impact of driving and would want to reduce the volume of microplastics and other waste generated by your trip.
Is KiriCoin Integration Really Just Greenwashing?
KiriCoin seems like a sensible move. Stellantis generates interest in its new cryptocurrency and electric vehicle while also showing that they care about your vehicle’s environmental impact. As a driver, you get to reduce your impact on the planet and get rewarded for it with KiriCoin, which you can use to claim free or discounted goods and services.
However, inherent in the proposition is that your Fiat New 500 is constantly recording what you’re doing. We’ve come to expect this behavior with our smartphones and smart home equipment. However, the Connected Car is still a relatively new concept, despite having been increasingly commonplace over the past decade.
Insurance companies have long wanted us to install black box recorders into our cars. These units track how we drive to initially lower insurance premiums. But they also give the company some wiggle room to reject your claim based on the captured data.
The car manufacturers get to dictate how and when we use our vehicles, and KiriCoin appears to add a layer of moral judgment on top of your purchase. It could also be seen as a form of manipulation, passing the environmental bill of vehicle production and use onto you, the end-user.
Rather than accept responsibility for the car industry’s destructive nature, Stellantis appears to be participating in a form of environmental blackmail. In effect, KiriCoin is a rewards program. Cryptocurrencies are still relatively new, and young technologies are often quite exciting, hence the interest in Bitcoin.
Similarly, PayPal recently acquired the cryptosecurity firm Curv to improve its cryptocurrency services. However, aside from buzzwords like cryptocurrency and blockchain, KiriCoin is a standard rewards program, the sort you might expect from a large grocery chain, for example.
In the initial announcement, Stellantis noted that you’d only be able to spend your KiriCoin in a dedicated store, further limiting the usefulness of the reward.
Are Cryptocurrencies the Future?
The KiriCoin could be an exciting use of technology to reward environmentally-friendly behaviors. Conversely, it may turn out to be a form of on-trend marketing with little real-world value.
We’ll only know for sure once drivers of the Fiat New 500 have had a chance to collect some for themselves. The KiriCoin is currently available in 13 European countries, with the UK set to follow soon.
However, the increasing interest in cryptocurrencies shows that the technology may shape how digital services operate in the future. If they are to have an ever-present impact on our daily lives, it’s essential to get to grips with the underlying technology, the blockchain.
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